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Sometimes I come up with random thoughts from nowhere. And some of them are totally useless, while others form into valuable questions that are worth looking into.
And one of the more peculiar ones was: “what happens to your online existence when you die?”
The process of transferring physical property is somewhat clear and most of you probably understand what will happen with your house or other personal belongings.
But what happens to your online accounts? Who will terminate your subscriptions? Who will take control of your cloud storage? What will happen to years of family pictures stored in Google Photos or iCloud?
These questions are rarely asked because most people don’t even think about their digital life.
However, an average person today leaves behind a decent amount of digital information.
In this article, we’ll look at what happens to our online accounts after death, how big platforms deal with digital inheritance and what you can do about it, right now.
The Digital Life You Leave Behind
Nobody is able to cancel their favorite subscription after they die.
And the subscriptions the person had, remain active. Meanwhile, the people left behind are busy dealing with grief and legal responsibilities.
On top of that, when they find out about digital legacy, they realize they have to deal with another big problem.
When it comes to these services, each of them has its own rules, privacy policies and way of managing accounts once the owner is no longer alive.
The issue is that most companies do not automatically find out when someone has died and this process gets even more difficult when families are not aware of all the accounts that exist at all.
The cost can become a problem as well. Streaming services, software subscriptions, and other regular payments may keep charging the linked credit card until someone sees it and cancels the service.
Money is only part of the issue. The other part is dealing with digital items that cannot be replaced. Family photos that exist only in an account, personal papers, and a lifetime of memories can become impossible to reach when no one knows where they are stored or how to get them back.
This is the digital legacy problem, a problem everyone will have to deal with, but no one is aware of.
How Platforms Handle Digital Legacy
The Tools Platforms Already Provide
Google has a good system for what happens to your digital stuff when you are not using it anymore.
They have a service called Inactive Account Manager which lets you decide what Google does with your account when you are not using it. You can say how long you want Google to wait before they do something with your account, preferably a 3, 6, 12 or 18 month time period.
After that period, Google can share the information you selected with your trusted contacts, and you can also choose to have your account deleted.
These options can both be enabled. Your contacts get access to the information you selected, during their download window.
Google can then delete your account three months after that window ends.
If you never set up Inactive Account Manager, your family can still request access to some of your account data after your death. But they don't go through the normal account recovery process. Google has a separate process for deceased users that requires documentation, including a death certificate and identification.
In some cases, getting access to account data may also require a court order, because Google doesn’t hand over passwords or let anyone else log in as you.
Apple introduced Legacy Contact with iOS 15.2 in 2021.
The feature allows users to designate up to five people who can request access to iCloud data after their death. The process requires Legacy Contact access key and proof of death.
The data available can include photos, notes, emails, files, and other iCloud information. Without a Legacy Contact configured, Apple generally requires a court order before granting access to a deceased person’s account.
Facebook does things in a bit different way.
On Facebook, users can pick a Legacy Contact who can look after a few parts of their profile once they are gone, like writing a pinned post at the top of it. Users can also choose to delete their Facebook account completely after they die.
If users do not pick either of these options, Facebook needs someone to ask them to make the account a memorial, which means someone would need to show them things like proof that the person is dead.
Other platforms remain inconsistent.
X allows relatives or authorized representatives to request account deactivation. Reddit does not offer a traditional inheritance system and focuses mainly on account removal requests. Other smaller services have no documented procedure at all.
The main problem is that every platform has its own rules and there is no universal process that transfers digital accounts the way physical assets can be handled through traditional inheritance systems.
Many people also don't know that tools for handling some of these accounts even exist, so they never set them up in the first place.
The Locked Vault Problem
Every single account that we use needs some kind of authentication. A lot of the time the person who passed away was the only one who knew the passwords and the important details.
Using a password manager can help with this, but only if you set it up to allow someone else to get in if something happens to you.
Bitwarden has a feature called Emergency Access that lets you pick people you trust to get into your account if something happens. The account owner chooses a waiting period between 1 and 90 days. During that period, the owner can reject the request. If you do not do anything then the person you chose can get in and can do anything that they are allowed to do.
In the case of 1Password, family members on a 1Password Families account can use the family organizer's recovery process to recover their own accounts.
However, the organizer does not gain access to the member's account during recovery. 1Password sends an email to the member being recovered, so recovering a deceased member's account would require access to that person's email inbox. 1Password also provides an Emergency Kit with important account information that users can store securely.
But these methods are only effective when set up while the account owner is still alive.
A password manager that doesn’t include provisions for emergencies will keep your accounts secure from hackers but also prevent your loved ones from accessing them afterward.
This ties into the authentication segment of the privacy fundamentals series. I have dived into the authentication part in detail in it:
When Subscriptions Outlive Their Owner
Subscription services are what families notice first, because they keep charging the card.
Different recurring services do not automatically stop when an account owner passes away.
There is no automatic notification for these companies about the person’s death. Companies will keep taking money from the connected payment system until families cancel their subscriptions or the connected payment method becomes inactive.
Stopping the payment methods can become much more difficult than it might seem.
Because you first need to find every active subscription which can be difficult.
Some of these subscriptions renew once a year, which means that such services are not noticeable when checking the recent expenses. Moreover, some services use other platforms to make payments (e.g., Apple’s App Store, Google Play.)
For many families, it means poring over months’ worth of bank statements, credit card statements, and emails looking for accounts that exist and the payments made to them.
The existence of family plans presents another problem.
Someone who is paying for the Spotify, Netflix, or other shared subscription will likely have other family accounts tied to the same payment methods. If they become unusable, then not just the person who originally set up the account would suffer.
The easy way out is to simply write down all your active subscriptions, the account they are billed on, how much you are spending, and the accounts that are associated with each.
One little document created by you today can save someone else weeks of looking later.
Why Crypto Creates a Unique Inheritance Problem
Cryptocurrency takes the digital legacy issue to another level where access relies completely on the ownership of particular credentials.
Conventional financial systems have established processes for inheritance. Banks can verify death certificates and authorized heirs before transferring access to accounts and I get it, the process can be slow, but there is still a system designed for it.
However, cryptocurrencies do not work this way.
A crypto wallet is basically controlled by a private key or seed phrase.
The private key is a long string of characters that proves ownership of the funds inside a wallet. The seed phrase is usually a list of 12 or 24 ordinary words that can regenerate that private key if it’s lost. Either one gives full access to whatever the wallet holds.
In other words, whoever has that information can access the funds and whoever does not have it cannot access them, regardless of how closely related they are to that person.
Now, don’t get me wrong, the blockchain can still show that the funds exist. Anyone can see the wallet balance and transaction history, but without the required credentials, those assets remain inaccessible.
According to Chainalysis estimates, between 2.78 million and 3.79 million Bitcoin may have been lost permanently. Chainalysis estimated that this represented roughly 20% of all Bitcoin mined at the time, with some of those losses resulting from people losing access to their wallets or dying without leaving a way for others to recover them.
The QuadrigaCX case is the famous example, though the story is more complicated than it first appears.
So what’s QuadrigaCX? It was a Canadian cryptocurrency exchange that collapsed in January 2019, weeks after founder Gerald Cotten reportedly died in India in December 2018 from complications of Crohn’s disease. His widow’s initial affidavit said Cotten was the only person who held the passwords to the exchange’s cold wallets, and roughly C$180 million in customer cryptocurrency was inaccessible without him.
Investigators from Ernst & Young later found that the cold wallets had been emptied in April 2018, months before Gerald Cotten's death. Five of the six wallets had held no funds since then. What initially appeared to be a case of an owner taking passwords to his grave was something more complex.
But still, the issues it identifies are legitimate: Cryptocurrency does not have a similar counterpart of the bank phoning the family or some institution having a backup.
In short, where there is no one to inherit the cryptocurrency or where the person dies without having provided his seed phrase or private key, the coins will be lost forever.
Therefore, for those who have invested in cryptocurrency, the key to success is preparedness. Make a copy of the seed phrase and ensure that someone trusted knows about its whereabouts.
Building a Digital Legacy Plan
This isn’t meant to be a complete guide for every platform.
The problem is really big. On top of that, every service has different rules and requirements. A better approach is building a simple framework that works regardless of which platforms you use:
Know What You Have
The first step is understanding what you have.
Make a list of your relevant accounts. This includes email, banking, cloud storage, social media, subscriptions, authentication applications, password manager, and cryptocurrency wallets.
It doesn’t have to be the list of all your passwords right away, but the point is to have an existing list somewhere other than in your brain.
Most people don’t realize how many online accounts they have until they actually try making a list.
Prioritize What Cannot Be Replaced
Understand that not each and every account has the same importance.
Losing access to a streaming account is inconvenient, but losing twenty years of family photos stored in a cloud account is different and losing a crypto wallet containing significant assets carries a whole different level of risk.
In short, focus on prioritizing accounts based on what they contain. The accounts holding irreplaceable memories or financial assets deserve the most attention.
Use the Tools That Already Exist
There are some large players who already have found ways to solve these issues.
Google Inactive Account Manager, Apple Legacy Contact, and Facebook Legacy Contact are tools that let users decide what happens to certain parts of their digital accounts after they die.
On Facebook, a Legacy Contact has limited control over a memorialized account. They can write a pinned post, manage the profile and cover photo, request removal of the account, and download a copy of the account information if the deceased person allowed it.
These options only become available after someone reports the death and Facebook memorializes the account.
Password managers provide some emergency access solutions as well.
Bitwarden lets trusted contact request access. 1Password provides recovery access from family accounts and Emergency Kits.
Such tools exist due to the difficulty of account access without prior preparation. The main issue here is that almost nobody sets up these tools.
And I get it, not many platforms offer this yet, so make the most of the ones that do.
Tell Someone About the Plan
A digital legacy plan only works if another person knows it exists.
That person could be a partner or someone you trust. They do not necessarily need every password. They just need to know that a plan exists, where the important information is stored, and what steps to take when needed.
Don’t become paranoid. Some people might feel like “If I tell, my privacy will be jeopardized.” But sometimes, you just have to do what must be done.
A Small Habit With a Long Term Impact
Creating online accounts requires almost no decision making and takes very little effort. But over time, these decisions add up and turn into a big pile of junk.
Most people probably have dozens of accounts they no longer remember creating. Some accounts are connected to old emails, have payment information attached to them or contain years of personal data that nobody else knows exists.
The problem is that forgetting an account is as easy as creating one and if you don’t know what accounts exist, managing your digital legacy becomes almost impossible.
The first step is knowing what you have and what you don’t. Keep track of the services you use, delete accounts you no longer need, and avoid leaving behind unnecessary digital clutter that someone else may eventually have to deal with.
More importantly, take responsibility for the systems you build around your digital life.
I hope you enjoyed the read.
See you in the next post.
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