The deliciously named ‘digital legacy service’, iCroak.com, has listed a few of the reasons why travellers might want to lodge details of their passport with them.
iCroak, a start-up company based in the UK, quotes the UK’s Identity and Passport Service (IPS) statistics – Over 60,000 passports stolen abroad between Apr 09 to Mar 10 and 279,000+ replacements for lost or stolen passports in the UK & abroad during same period – and some of the explanations given…
- Taxi attacked by gunman on way to airport in Brazil
- Fell out of bag while snowboarding
- Drunk boyfriend (now ex) destroyed it
- Last seen in pocket of a coat donated to tramp
- Wallet stolen at children’s party with passport inside
- Put in trash by infant daughter; and
- Put on a fire with clothes
iCroak was launched in October and has already has users from over 100 countries. It offers secure and encrypted storage space in the “cloud” where you can store all your precious digital documents and information, including your passport and travel insurance details.
CEO Paul Golding says:
What we’re offering is peace of mind. You can travel knowing that you don’t have to carry paper copies of everything separate to your original documents. Quite simply log on from your phone, laptop or internet café and all of your paperwork including your passport, flight tickets or health insurance are there ready to be printed off wherever you are.
However, as the name suggests, iCroak offers more than just a handy digital strong-box to keep your passport information safe. A storage account (from £10 per annum for 50Mb) also allows the account holder to nominate a guardian who would receive all of the information if they were to meet an untimely end.
Paul and his brother Mark came up with the idea when their aunt died and they started trying to track down all her logins and passwords for the numerous sites she’d joined, shopped with and enjoyed online.
As this BBC article about iCroak makes clear, these days many of us have a surprisingly large and diverse portfolio of digital assets to pass on – anything from scanned copies of birth and marriage certificates, Wills, and share certificates to bank details, iTunes collections, Adsense account logins and Amazon orders.
Who will you bequeath your online poker winnings to if you get mown down by a bus in Asia?
This article taken from ttp://blog.brillianttrips.com
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