Page 17 - Aging Parents - FDCCPublications

PATIENCE, PLANNING AND SUPPORT: REFLECTIONS ON DEALING WITH AGING FAMILY MEMBERS
Addressing access to digital devices by memory or judgment- impaired individuals is a decision that needs to be made
by entire families. Susceptibility to fraud or parting with money in response to email requests are red flags that need immediate attention. I am familiar with an instance where an elderly widow sent over $100,000 to someone claiming to be a Naval officer stationed in the Persian Gulf who said he needed the money to help the war effort.
Sometimes, a person
experiencing memory issues
will misuse a digital device.
another case, a person in a locked
memory ward called 911 to
report she was being held against
her will and, at a different time,
because she thought something
had happened to her adult
child. When the police showed
up at the memory ward (and at
her child’s house at 6 AM), they
discovered that no emergency
existed. While families want to
have the convenience of calling a loved one on a cell phone, the loved one’s misuse of the phone can be a problem. 911 services can flag a phone number so they do not respond to calls from someone experiencing dementia or confusion.
Digital devices can offer benefits to people at risk of falling. Apple devices allow the user to designate an emergency contact. If your loved one also has an Apple Watch, the watch will automatically notify both emergency services and the emergency contact in the event of a fall. Android users can add emergency contact information on its lock screen so emergency responders can locate the phone number of the emergency contact without logging onto a phone and notify them in the event of an emergency.
Finally, retiring digital devices or accessing information stored on such devices in the case of death presents many issues. For instance, Bob’s wife passed away recently. I tried to help Bob streamline his digital devices. He had his and his wife’s cell phone, two iPads, and a 10-year-old laptop that could not run the current operating system and was frustratingly slow. After a discussion with him, he decided
to move his number to his wife’s larger and newer phone and trade his old MacBook, his old phone, and one iPad to offset the cost of a new MacBook. I backed up the MacBook
to an external hard drive, and iCloud backed up all the other devices to the iCloud, wiped the hard drives, traded them, and brought home a new MacBook Pro. We had a password list to access the iCloud account and his wife’s email account.
After the trade-ins, I set up the new devices and discovered that I had forgotten a critical step. First, I restored the MacBook from the backup and found that the old MacBook
In
Discussing the importance of not clicking on email links/ attachments without knowing the source, not clicking on links in text messages from unknown senders, and not sending money to people who solicit via these unsolicited communications should be high on the list of the technical advisor.
was so old that the software on the old computer was incompatible with the new iOS running on the new laptop. Rather than try to delete all the incompatible software, I wiped and restored the operating system on the new computer. I would still be able to restore the data from iCloud. While the operating system was installed on the new MacBook Pro (and because I am impatient!) I decided to wipe his wife’s iPad concurrently and restore Bob’s iPad account on that the MacBook and trying to access
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machine. After restoring
her iCloud account, I discovered that accessing the iCloud from a new device also requires Multifactor Authentication. Bob’s wife’s cell phone number had been surrendered. But MFA’s have a backup if the phone number is no longer available. An email can be sent to the email address on
file. However, I had just erased Bob’s wife’s iPad and, with it, her email access. Trying to access the email on the web from a new device also required Multifactor Authentication. Therefore, we could not access the iCloud due to MFA, and we could not access the backup to the iCloud MFA because the email address also required MFA. We had one last chance to recover the data stored on the iCloud; we could answer the secret questions set up when his wife selected her password. Unfortunately, the secret questions his wife chose were not her mother’s maiden name or the street where she grewup,forwhichBobknewtheanswer. Instead,shechose “who is the most famous person you have ever met?” The answer on the password list did not work, and while we tried several acquaintances whose accomplishments may have qualified them as “famous,” we could not guess the correct answer. I eventually called Apple Support and was told that a court order from a probate court would be required to access the account. The Christmas card list (stored on her