PasswordBox, the increasingly popular password management solution, today announced that it has acquired Legacy Locker, a digital afterlife service that – in the inevitable case that you pass away – grants access to your online assets to your friends and loved ones. With this acquisition, PasswordBox says, it is now “the only free service to manage your online accounts during life and after.” Last week, PasswordBox also announced that it had closed a $6 million Series A round led by Canada's Omers Ventures.
Legacy Locker was founded by Jeremy Toeman and launched back in 2009. Today, Toeman is the CEO of Dijit, a b2b platform for the entertainment industry and the company behind the personalized TV guide service NextGuide. “Over the past four years, we have taken the market by storm with our online safety deposit box for internet passwords,” said Toeman in a statement today. “Now our customers will benefit from the next wave of technology that will allow them to manage their current digital life, while ensuring their digital afterlife is still being protected too.” Toeman will join PasswordBox as an advisor.
It's unclear how many users Legacy Locker currently has, but all of its currently users will get a free lifetime subscription to the service as part of this acquisition. As the PasswordBox team told me, Legacy Locker's features will be incorporated into its existing product and the company plans to continue to develop it over time.
While most of us probably don't spent a lot of time thinking about what happens to our digital assets after our death, we've seen the rise of a number of similar digital afterlife services in the past. Companies like AssetLock, Cirrus Legacy and even Google (with its Inactive Account Manager) now offer services that are similar to Legacy Locker's features.
As Jason Kincaid wrote when he first reviewed Legacy Locker in 2009, “the real issue with Legacy Locker (and other ‘online wills') is that they are only useful if the company exists for many years, which is hardly a given for most startups.” For the time being, at least, it looks like the service has found a safe haven at Password Box, which seems to be on track to becoming a sizable company.
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