↳ Writing

The 10-year right nobody uses

Danish law gives families ten years to claim access to a deceased person's digital estate — their emails, cloud photos, subscriptions, accounts. Ten years is a long time. Long enough to raise a child, finish a degree, rebuild a life. And still, almost no one uses it.

I didn't know this law existed until I went looking for it. Most people never go looking. That gap — between a right that exists on paper and a right that gets used — is the whole story.

A right is not the same thing as access

On paper, the law sounds generous. A decade of standing to request a deceased person's data from any platform that holds it. In practice, it means a grieving family member has to know the right exists, know which of the dozens of services their father, sister, or partner used, find the right request process for each one — a form here, a support email there, a legal notice somewhere else — and do all of this while sorting through funeral arrangements and everything else death brings with it.

Nobody drafted this law to be cruel. But a right nobody can operationalize functions, for most people, like no right at all. It sits in a statute book, technically theirs, practically unreachable.

This isn't unique to grief. It's a pattern. Sick leave nobody files for because the paperwork is worse than the pain. Warranties nobody claims because the process costs more than the refund. Tax credits nobody takes because nobody knew to look. A right without a path to it is a right in name only — and the gap between the two is where most of a right's value quietly disappears.

A law without a path is just a promise.

Rights become real when they become products

The right existed before anyone built a way to use it. What changes that isn't more legislation — it's someone doing the unglamorous work of turning "you're entitled to this" into "here's exactly how, in one afternoon." That's a product problem, not a legal one. The law sets the boundary; something else has to walk people to it.

This is, more or less, what I've spent the last two years building. Itterno exists because the ten-year right was sitting there unused, and unused rights don't help anyone. We built the discovery layer that most families don't have the time or knowledge to build themselves — figuring out where someone's digital footprint actually lives, verifying who has standing to claim it, and handling the process end to end. Not because the law was wrong, but because a law without a path is just a promise.

The uncomfortable part

There's a version of this essay that stops at "and that's why our product matters." I want to sit for a second longer on the uncomfortable part instead: how much of what we call a "right" only becomes usable once someone builds the infrastructure around it, and how easy it is for that infrastructure to never get built — because there's no natural business in doing it, or because the people who need it most are the least equipped, in the moment, to demand it.

I think about this now whenever I see a right, a policy, or a benefit described as if its existence were the end of the story. It rarely is. The real question is always: what does someone actually have to do, on their worst week, to use this? If the honest answer is "more than they can manage," the right isn't finished yet — it's just been declared.