What Happens to Your Digital Accounts When You Die?

A generation ago, when someone died, their important things lived in a drawer. A file in the loft, a bundle of letters, a photo album. Today most of it lives behind a password — and the people you love don't have it.

Here's what actually happens to the major platforms, and what you can do today to spare your family the headache.

Streaming and subscriptions (Netflix, Spotify, Apple, Amazon Prime)

The hard truth: these keep billing until someone cancels them. No platform proactively closes a paid account because the user has died, and most won't accept a death certificate without a long back-and-forth.

The fastest route is almost always the bank. Once your family contacts your bank, recurring card payments can be stopped at source, even before the individual accounts are closed. This is one of the first practical things estate administrators are told to do — but only if they know what subscriptions to look for.

A simple list of every subscription you pay for, kept somewhere your family can find it, can save weeks of detective work scrolling through bank statements.

Apple ID

Apple has a Legacy Contact feature, and it's genuinely excellent. You can nominate up to five people in your iPhone settings (Settings → your name → Sign-In & Security → Legacy Contact). Apple gives each contact an access key. With that key and a death certificate, they can request access to your photos, messages, notes and files.

Without a legacy contact, Apple is one of the hardest companies in the world to get data out of. The default is permanent loss.

Google (Gmail, Photos, Drive, YouTube)

Google's tool is called Inactive Account Manager. You set a period of inactivity — say, 6 months — and nominate who Google should email if your account goes quiet. You choose what they're allowed to download.

If you don't set this up, your family can request closure of your account or, in limited cases, access to its contents. It's a slow, formal process and Google grants access at its discretion.

Facebook and Instagram

Both Meta platforms offer two options:

• Memorialisation: the profile is preserved, "Remembering" is added before your name, and a designated Legacy Contact can manage it.
• Deletion: the account is permanently removed.

You can set your preference now in Facebook settings. Without instructions, families usually go for memorialisation by default — which can be a comfort, or a source of pain on every birthday notification. It's worth having an opinion either way.

WhatsApp, TikTok, X, LinkedIn

These have lighter-touch processes. Most allow account closure with a death certificate and proof of relationship, but few have proactive legacy features. Your family will need to know the accounts exist in the first place.

Cloud storage and password managers

This is the one that catches families out. Years of family photos sit in iCloud, Google Photos or Dropbox. The login is in a password manager — also locked. Without the master password, the rest of it is unreachable.

If you use a password manager (and most of us should), check whether it has an emergency access or legacy feature. 1Password, Bitwarden and Dashlane all do. Nominate one trusted person and the chain unlocks.

What families actually struggle with

Talk to anyone who's administered an estate in the last few years and the same themes come up:

• Subscriptions they didn't know existed, billing for months.
• Photo libraries they can't access, sometimes the only copies of a parent's last years.
• Social media profiles that nobody is sure whether to leave up or take down.
• Two-factor authentication sending codes to a phone that's been disconnected.

The simplest thing you can do today

You don't need a complicated digital legacy strategy. You need a short, plain list:

• Which platforms you use
• Which ones are paid
• Where the master password lives
• Whether you want each account memorialised, downloaded or deleted

Twenty minutes now. A week of frustration spared later.

Left For You has a section for your digital life — subscriptions, accounts, wishes. Start your guide →