Estate planning typically focuses on physical assets — property, bank accounts, investments, personal belongings. What gets overlooked is the increasingly significant category of digital assets: email accounts, social media profiles, cloud storage, photo libraries, cryptocurrencies, and subscription services.

When someone dies, their digital life doesn’t automatically disappear. But accessing, managing, or closing those accounts creates unexpected complications for family members who often don’t know the passwords or even the full list of accounts.

Here’s what happens in practice and what you can do about it.

The Access Problem

Most online services have terms of service that make accounts non-transferable. Legally, your email account, Facebook profile, or Netflix subscription belongs to you personally and can’t be inherited the way a bank account can.

In practice, this means family members can’t simply contact Google, Microsoft, or Apple and say “my relative died, give me access to their account.” The companies will ask for legal documentation — death certificates, proof of executor status, and sometimes court orders.

Even with proper documentation, some services won’t grant access. The account may be memorialized (Facebook, Instagram) or permanently closed (some email providers), but the content isn’t handed over to family members.

This creates real problems. Important documents stored in Google Drive or Dropbox might be inaccessible. Family photos in iCloud or Google Photos might be lost. Correspondence in Gmail containing financial or legal information might be needed for estate administration but unavailable.

What Different Services Do

Google: Offers an Inactive Account Manager where you can designate trusted contacts and specify what happens to your data after a period of inactivity. You can choose to have specific data shared with contacts or have the account deleted. This is one of the better implementations, but you have to set it up proactively.

Apple: Allows you to designate a Legacy Contact who can access your iCloud data after your death. They’ll need your death certificate and a legacy access key. This covers photos, documents, and most iCloud content but not payment information or passwords stored in Keychain.

Facebook and Instagram: Accounts can be memorialized or permanently deleted. For memorialized accounts, you can designate a legacy contact who can manage the memorialized account but can’t log in as you or see private messages.

Microsoft: Allows a family member or executor to close the account with appropriate documentation but doesn’t provide access to the account contents.

Email providers: Policies vary wildly. Some will close the account on request with proof of death. Others require court orders to even confirm the account exists. Almost none will forward the account contents to family members.

Financial services: Banks and investment platforms have established processes for executor access. Cryptocurrency exchanges vary — some have estate planning features, many don’t, and if you’re the only one with the private keys to a crypto wallet, that value is effectively lost.

What You Should Do Now

Document your accounts. Maintain a list of all significant online accounts — email, cloud storage, social media, financial services, subscriptions. Update it annually. Store it somewhere your executor can find it, but not somewhere easily accessible to others while you’re alive.

Use a password manager with emergency access. Password managers like 1Password and Bitwarden offer emergency access features. You designate trusted contacts who can request access, and after a waiting period (you set the duration), they’re granted access if you haven’t declined the request. This gives family members the passwords they need without giving them immediate access.

Set up legacy contacts and inactive account managers. Google, Apple, Facebook, and a few others offer these features. Use them. It takes 10 minutes and solves major problems later.

Document offline access to encrypted devices. If your laptop, phone, or external drives are encrypted (they should be), your executor needs the passwords or recovery keys. Store these securely — possibly with your lawyer or in a safe deposit box with instructions to provide them to your executor upon death.

Specify your wishes explicitly. Do you want your social media profiles memorialized or deleted? Should your private photos remain private or be shared with family? Make these preferences clear in your will or in a separate digital assets directive.

The Legal Situation

Australia’s legal framework for digital assets is still developing. The Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act provides guidance, but each state has its own implementation, and courts are still working through how these rules apply in practice.

A will that explicitly addresses digital assets and grants your executor authority to access, manage, and distribute them is much stronger than a will that’s silent on digital property. Include language like:

“I grant my executor full authority to access, manage, distribute, and delete my digital assets, including but not limited to email accounts, social media profiles, cloud storage, digital photographs, and online financial accounts, according to the instructions I have left in [location].”

Consult with a lawyer experienced in digital estate planning — this is an emerging specialty, but the number of lawyers who understand the issues has grown significantly in the past few years.

Subscriptions and Recurring Charges

Don’t forget the practical matter of ongoing subscription charges. A deceased person’s Netflix account will keep billing indefinitely until someone cancels it. Cloud storage subscriptions, software-as-a-service, gym memberships, phone plans — all continue until actively cancelled.

Executors should check bank statements for recurring charges and systematically cancel them. This is tedious but necessary. A consultancy we spoke with, specialists in digital systems, noted that one of their recurring requests is helping estate administrators identify and close digital subscriptions and services after a death — the practical side of digital estate administration.

The Cryptocurrency Special Case

If you hold cryptocurrency, the estate planning implications are severe. Crypto wallets protected by private keys that only you know become permanently inaccessible when you die. There’s no “forgot password” option for a private key.

Options include:

• Storing a backup of your private keys with your lawyer or in a safe deposit box. This is secure but creates single points of failure.
• Using a multi-signature wallet where multiple parties need to approve transactions. Set it up so your executor can access funds with appropriate co-signers.
• Using a custodial service that holds your crypto on your behalf. This reintroduces counterparty risk but makes estate access much simpler.

The crypto industry hasn’t solved this problem well. Many people have lost access to significant holdings when the only person with the keys died unexpectedly. Plan for this explicitly if you hold meaningful crypto assets.

The Practical Reality

Most people don’t think about digital estate planning until it’s too late — either they’re elderly and realize they’ve left their family with no way to access critical information, or they’re suddenly dealing with a deceased relative’s digital chaos.

The investment to address this is small: a few hours of documentation, some password manager setup, and possibly a consultation with a lawyer. The benefit to your family is substantial — they’ll face enough challenges dealing with grief and estate administration without also fighting with tech companies for account access.

Do it now, while it’s a planning exercise rather than an emergency.