Most people spend real effort accumulating digital lives — photos spanning decades, personal journals, financial records, creative work, messages with people they love — without any plan for what happens to those things after they die.
The result is predictable: family members locked out of accounts full of irreplaceable memories. Recurring charges continuing on a credit card for years. Private communications sitting on servers with no instruction from anyone about whether to preserve or delete them. And in some cases, accounts that are exploited or impersonated because no one knew they existed.
A digital estate plan is the solution. It doesn’t require a lawyer. It requires a few hours of organised thought and some specific actions on the platforms you use most. Here’s how to do it.
Why This Is Harder Than a Physical Estate
Physical assets follow relatively well-understood legal paths. Property passes to heirs through wills, trusts, or intestate succession. The legal system has centuries of experience adjudicating who gets what.
Digital assets are different in several ways that create real complications.
Platforms treat accounts as licences, not property. When you sign up for Google Photos, Apple iCloud, or most other services, you’re typically agreeing to a licence to use the service rather than acquiring property rights in an account you can pass on. This means even the most carefully written will may not be legally sufficient to transfer access to your accounts.
Stored Communications Act complications. US federal law includes provisions that restrict the disclosure of electronic communications — emails, messages, potentially stored files — even to executors of an estate, unless the deceased explicitly consented to such disclosure. The legal framework for accessing a deceased person’s digital communications is actively contested and varies by platform and jurisdiction.
Encryption creates real barriers. If content is protected by a passphrase that only you knew, and there’s no recovery mechanism, it may simply be inaccessible after death. The same property that makes encryption valuable as a privacy protection makes it a practical barrier for heirs.
Accounts contain financial value. Digital accounts increasingly hold real monetary value — cryptocurrency wallets, PayPal and Venmo balances, domain names, creator monetisation accounts, digital storefronts. These can constitute significant estate assets, and losing access to them can mean losing real money.
Step 1: Take Inventory of Your Digital Accounts
Before you can plan, you need to know what you have.
Set aside time to go through your email inbox, your password manager (if you use one), and your phone’s app list. Make a list categorised roughly as follows:
Financial accounts with accessible value. Bank accounts with online access, investment accounts, payment services (PayPal, Venmo, Stripe for freelancers), cryptocurrency holdings, domain names, creator accounts (YouTube, Patreon, Etsy, App Store), and any accounts that hold real money or generate income.
Communication and social accounts. Email accounts (especially your primary one, since it’s used for password recovery on everything else), social media profiles, messaging apps, and any accounts that contain conversations or connections you’d want preserved or handled deliberately.
Storage and archive accounts. Cloud storage services, photo platforms, note-taking apps, document storage, and any place where you keep files that have personal or sentimental value.
Subscription and utility accounts. Streaming services, software subscriptions, news subscriptions. These don’t hold personal data of lasting importance, but they generate ongoing charges that someone will need to cancel.
For each account, record: the service name, the login email or username, where the password is stored (ideally a password manager entry), and a brief note about why it matters and what you’d want to happen to it.
Step 2: Use Platform Tools for Designated Heirs
Many major platforms offer mechanisms specifically designed for account access after death. These are more legally reliable than trying to address digital accounts in a traditional will, because they work within each platform’s own terms of service.
Google Inactive Account Manager
Google allows you to designate trusted contacts who will be notified and given the option to download your data if your account becomes inactive. Access the Inactive Account Manager in your Google account’s Security settings.
You can choose how long of an inactivity period triggers the process (3, 6, 12, or 18 months), which contacts receive notification, and whether those contacts can download your data. This works for Gmail, Google Photos, Drive, and other Google services.
Apple Legacy Contact
Apple introduced a Legacy Contact feature that allows one or more people you designate to request access to your iCloud data after your death. The designated person must submit an Apple Legacy Contact access request with a death certificate. Access is then provided to your iCloud Photos, iCloud Drive, notes, contacts, and other iCloud data — but not to data encrypted with a device passcode that Apple doesn’t hold.
Set this up in your Apple ID settings under Password & Security.
Meta (Facebook / Instagram) Memorialization
Facebook allows you to designate a Legacy Contact who can manage your profile in a memorialised state after your death: writing a pinned post, responding to new friend requests from people who knew you, and requesting removal of your account entirely. They cannot log in as you, see your messages, or make posts on your behalf.
Instagram can be memorialised similarly; the memorialised account becomes a tribute space without active management.
What if there’s no platform tool?
For services that don’t provide designated heir or legacy contact features — which is most services — the practical options are limited. You can leave login credentials in a secure location accessible to your executor. You can direct your executor to contact the platform with a death certificate and request account closure or data download. Whether the platform honours that request depends on their own policies.
The absence of a platform tool is information: services that haven’t built one likely haven’t thought carefully about what they owe users’ families. That may be a factor in which services you choose for storing things that matter.
Step 3: Document Your Wishes Somewhere Legally Relevant
Naming specific digital assets and instructions for them in your will is possible, and courts are getting more practice interpreting these provisions. But there are limits.
Including your login credentials in a will is a bad idea for two reasons: wills become public records when probated, and the platforms whose accounts you’re addressing have their own policies about whether a will can override their terms of service. Many service agreements explicitly say accounts aren’t transferable.
A better approach: use your will or an accompanying letter of instruction (attached to the will but not made public through probate) to:
- Direct your executor to the location of your password manager or digital account inventory
- Express your wishes for each category of digital account (preserve, delete, transfer, donate)
- Designate who should have access to what, and under what conditions
- Identify whether any accounts contain assets of financial value that should be inventoried as part of the estate
The Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act (RUFADAA), now adopted by 47 US states, provides a legal framework for executors and trustees to access digital assets when explicitly authorised to do so. An executor designated in a will has authority under RUFADAA to access digital property — but the extent of that access depends on what each platform allows and how your own wishes were documented.
A will that says “I direct my executor to access my digital accounts and distribute or delete them as they see fit” is better than a will that says nothing about digital accounts. A will combined with platform-level designations (Google Inactive Account Manager, Apple Legacy Contact) is better still.
Step 4: Address Encrypted Storage
Encrypted storage creates a specific problem: if your archive is protected by a passphrase only you know, and there’s no recovery mechanism, it may be permanently inaccessible after your death.
This is the right outcome if the content is truly private and you’d prefer deletion over access by heirs. But if your encrypted storage holds photos or documents that you’d want family members to have, passphrase loss means content loss.
Options:
Leave the passphrase in a sealed physical document with your will. This is low-tech but effective. A physical sealed envelope in a secure location, opened only after death, doesn’t require trusting any platform with your password.
Use a password manager with emergency access. Services like 1Password and Bitwarden allow you to designate emergency contacts who can request access to your vault after a waiting period. This is more convenient than a physical document and can be kept current as passwords change.
Use platform legacy tools where available. If the service holding your encrypted files has a built-in legacy contact feature, use it. It’s designed specifically for this scenario and has legal standing within that platform’s terms.
Store a recovery kit securely. For encrypted services that generate recovery codes, store those codes somewhere physically secure — a locked document, a safety deposit box — along with instructions about which service they correspond to.
Step 5: Make Ongoing Decisions Count
Digital estate planning isn’t a one-time task. It needs to be updated as your accounts and relationships change.
Review your digital account inventory when you:
- Open a significant new account (especially financial or archive accounts)
- Change your primary email address
- Update passwords for major accounts
- Go through major life changes: marriage, divorce, the birth of children, or the death of someone previously named as a designated heir or legacy contact
The platforms you use most for personal storage deserve particular attention. Cloud services are good at keeping data indefinitely — which is useful in life and potentially complicated after death if no one has credentials or a clear mandate to access or delete what’s stored there.
How daftei Handles This
daftei provides a 30-day grace window after account deletion is requested: you have 30 days to change your mind before deletion becomes permanent and irreversible. After that window, there is no recovery — deletion is complete.
This matters for estate planning in both directions. If you want your digital archive preserved after death, someone needs credentials and access before the account enters an inactive state. If you want your archive deleted rather than passed on, the 30-day window gives your executor time to initiate that deletion deliberately rather than having files linger on a server indefinitely.
daftei doesn’t currently have a built-in legacy contact feature, which means account access after death requires either sharing credentials through your estate documentation or working through your executor with the standard account recovery process. This is worth noting in your digital estate inventory: include your daftei login in your secure document so your executor knows it exists.
Files on daftei are encrypted at rest with AES-256 and in transit with TLS 1.3, and daftei is GDPR and CCPA compliant. For estate purposes, this means the contents of your archive are not exposed to third parties — but it also means your executor needs proper credentials to access them.
A Starting Point, Right Now
If you do nothing else after reading this, do these three things:
Set up your Google Inactive Account Manager. It takes about ten minutes and designates who can download your Google data — including all your Gmail and Google Photos — if your account goes inactive. This covers a substantial fraction of most people’s digital lives with minimal effort.
Set up an Apple Legacy Contact. If you use an iPhone or Mac and store anything in iCloud, this designates who can request access to your iCloud data after your death and provides a legally clean pathway for that access.
Create a one-page document that lists your major accounts, where the passwords are, and what you want done with each. Put this document somewhere your executor can find it. It doesn’t need to be notarised. It doesn’t need to be in your will. It just needs to exist.
The rest — the full inventory, the letter of instruction, the RUFADAA-aware estate planning — can come later. The immediate goal is to ensure that the accounts holding the things that matter most to you have some kind of plan, and that the people who might need access aren’t starting from zero.
Your digital archive represents years of memory and life. It deserves the same basic planning as your physical estate — and it needs it more urgently, because platforms can change policies, delete inactive accounts, or get acquired in ways that create windows where access becomes impossible.
Plan now while the accounts are accessible, the passwords are known, and the designations can be made on your terms.