What happens to your online accounts after you die

When someone dies, their online life keeps running. The email account still collects mail. The photos still sit in the cloud. The subscriptions keep charging the card. And the family, more often than not, has no way in, because the passwords lived in one person’s head and that person is gone.

This is one of the few parts of planning ahead you can finish in an afternoon, and it saves the people you love a slow, frustrating mess. Here’s what happens to the main accounts, and how to set them up so someone can reach them.

The problem in plain terms

Most companies won’t hand over a login when you ask, even with a death certificate. Their terms of service treat your account as yours alone, and sharing the password after death can violate those terms and privacy law both. So the family is left guessing, filing support tickets, and often getting nowhere. The photos of a whole childhood can sit behind a login nobody can open.

The fix is to use the tools these companies already built for exactly this, before anyone needs them.

Start with the phone number

This is the part almost nobody writes about, and it decides everything else.

The phone is where two-factor codes land. A family can have the right password and still be shut out of the bank, the email, and the photo backups. Each of them texts a code to a number nobody controls.

Some carriers will transfer a line to a family member or authorized representative, usually with proof of death. Ask before cancelling anything. Some families keep the number alive on a cheap plan for a few months while they work through the accounts one at a time.

Letting the line lapse is worse than being locked out. Numbers get recycled and reissued to strangers. Princeton researchers sampled 259 recycled numbers and found 171 could be used to hijack an account at a major site. The number that used to receive your mother’s bank codes will start receiving somebody else’s.

Apple: set a Legacy Contact

If your household runs on iPhones, this is the big one, because that’s where the photos usually live. Apple lets you name more than one Legacy Contact, and publishes no limit. Name carefully: any one of them can act alone, including permanently deleting the whole account. Go to Settings, tap your name, then Sign-In & Security, then Legacy Contact. The person you choose gets an access key. After you die, they use that key plus a copy of your death certificate to request access to your iCloud data. Apple keeps that access open for a limited window, so the family should download what matters rather than leave it there.

Two things Apple publishes that are worth knowing before you rely on this. Access lasts three years from approval, and then Apple permanently deletes the account. A Legacy Contact inherits the photos and files, but not the iCloud Keychain. Not purchases, subscriptions, or payment details either. The one thing that would unlock everything else is the one thing held back.

Do this for both partners. A surviving partner who was never named can be locked out of shared photos for good.

Google: turn on Inactive Account Manager

Google has a quiet setting called Inactive Account Manager. You tell Google how long to wait after you stop using your account, then it can notify people you trust and let them download the data you chose to share, or delete the account entirely. This covers Gmail, Google Photos, Drive, and the rest. It takes about five minutes and it’s the closest thing to a will your email will ever have. Search “Google Inactive Account Manager” and it’s the first result.

Facebook and Instagram: memorialize or delete

Facebook lets you pick a Legacy Contact to manage a memorialized profile. Or you can tell Facebook to delete the account when you’re gone. Instagram now has its own legacy contact, set separately. A Legacy Contact can pin a post and respond to new friend requests, but they cannot read your messages or log in as you. Instagram, owned by the same company, can memorialize or remove an account when a family member sends proof, but there’s no login handoff. Decide now which you’d want, so your family isn’t making that call in the first raw week.

Passwords: the master key

All of the above still leaves the everyday logins, the bank, the phone bill, the photo backups you set up years ago. The usual advice is a password manager with an emergency feature, where a trusted person can request access after a waiting period. Check what yours actually does before you rely on it, because the picture is patchier than most guides admit. Bitwarden’s Emergency Access needs a paid account on the giver’s side. 1Password has no automatic emergency access at all. Its recovery flow asks the account holder to respond, which is the one thing they cannot do. Dashlane retired its emergency contact feature.

Where it does work, it is the strongest single move here: set it up, add one person, and you have handed over the whole keyring at once.

If a password manager feels like too much, the low-tech version works too. Write the important logins on paper, seal it, and tell one person where it is. Keep it with your will, not in your email, where the login problem defeats itself.

Two mistakes you cannot undo

Do not close accounts early. In the first week somebody will tell the family to go and close everything down. Google is explicit that once an account is closed, no later request for its data can be granted. Photos that were recoverable on Monday are gone on Tuesday. Close nothing until you know what is inside it.

Cancelling a subscription is harder than it sounds. Apple’s own page says you cannot cancel a family member’s subscription, and its cancellation flow needs a sign-in you may not have. Changing the card number does not reliably stop the charges either. Card networks push the new number through to merchants automatically. Ring the provider, say the customer has died, and get it confirmed.

What the law says

Almost every state has adopted a law called RUFADAA, and one line in it matters more than the rest: the setting you click on the platform beats what your will says.

If you name an Apple Legacy Contact, that instruction wins over a contradicting clause in your will. If you name nobody, your executor is left arguing with a company. Two of the guides that push hardest for handling this in a will do not mention the override at all.

There is a second split worth knowing. An executor can usually get the catalog, meaning who was emailed and when, but the actual contents of messages need separate, explicit consent. A list of correspondents is not the letters.

The alternative to all of this is court. Reported orders run from about $2,000 into the tens of thousands, and one widow spent roughly three years litigating to recover 4,500 photographs. A working Legacy Contact resolves the same thing in about a week.

A short list to finish this week

Name an Apple Legacy Contact, or the equivalent on your phone. Turn on Google’s Inactive Account Manager. Decide what happens to your Facebook and Instagram. Put your master passwords somewhere a trusted person can reach. Then write down, in plain words, which accounts even exist, because the family can’t rescue an account they never knew about.

None of this is about the technology. It’s about not leaving the people you love standing outside a locked door full of your voice, your photos, and your everyday life. And if you are already thinking this far ahead, there is a harder question sitting behind the logins: not who can reach your accounts, but what in them you would actually want kept.

Account settings change often. Check the current steps with each company, and confirm the details above before you rely on them.