take the case of glenn williamson, a tech entrepreneur in portland, oregon. in august of 2012, he got the worst news possible. >> i was in the philippines speaking at a conference, and, you know, when your phone goes off 15 times and it's 3:00 in the morning in the united states, you have a bad feeling. you know it's not a good call. >> reporter: glenn's 73-year-old mother, lee, had died. as her fiduciary and as a 25- year veteran of the tech world, it fell to him to manage her online accounts. >> i knew my mom being a cool grandma, was on twitter. so, i knew she was on twitter and i knew she had a yahoo account. so, we had a baseline to start, but that's all we knew. >> reporter: after 20 hours of searching glenn found 13 different accounts belonging to his mother, including email social media and shopping accounts. >> so, we broke it down into categories-- travel, sentimental value, security-- and basically we searched on about 75 different sites. >> reporter: some had real value. after going through all the airlines we got to united and united did, indeed