Digital legacy

Five questions people ask as one

"Can my family get into my accounts?" is five questions, and a plan that answers only one of them fails. The first four are about getting in. The fifth is about who owns what is inside, and it is answered by a different body of law entirely.

• Can they get in technically? A password, an unlocked device, a recovery key.
• Are they allowed to? Legal authority as executor, agent or trustee — which is not the same as the ability to log in.
• Will the platform permit it? Every large service has its own process, and most will not simply hand over an account because somebody asks.
• What did you actually authorize, and where? A setting inside the account, a clause in a will, a power of attorney — and these can conflict.
• Who is entitled to what is inside? Access to an account and ownership of what it holds are decided separately. The digital-asset statutes settle the first and say expressly that they do not settle the second.

Knowing the password is not authority. Federal law prohibits accessing somebody else's account without authorization, and the fact that a family member wrote the password on a card in a drawer does not supply it. This is a frequent misunderstanding on the subject, and it is the one that puts a well-meaning relative on the wrong side of a statute.

Two different mistakes live here and they pull in opposite directions. Knowing the password is not authority — federal law prohibits accessing somebody else's account without authorization, and a password written on a card in a drawer does not supply it. And having authority is not entitlement — an executor who wins full access to a brokerage account has obtained the records, not the securities.

Why your family cannot simply ask

Families assume a death certificate and a grant of probate will open an email account, the way they open a bank account. They generally will not, and the reason is not corporate obstruction. A federal statute prohibits a provider from divulging the contents of a communication, and lists the exceptions. Inheriting an estate is not one of them; the lawful consent of the user is.

This is the whole design of the problem. Consent has to come from the account holder, which means it has to be given while they are alive. There is no document an executor can produce afterwards that manufactures it.^{Source 1}

The practical consequence: the family of someone who set nothing up is left negotiating with each platform's own process, which is slower, reaches less, and in the case of message content may fail entirely.

Email is not just another account

If you plan for one thing, plan for the primary email address. It is not an account among others — it is the recovery mechanism for most of the rest. Whoever controls it can reset passwords across banks, subscriptions, cloud storage and social accounts, which is exactly why platforms guard it and exactly why losing it strands everything downstream.

It is also where the evidence of the rest lives. A family with no inventory can often reconstruct one from a year of email: the statements, the renewal notices, the receipts. That makes email both the highest-value target for planning and the highest-value thing to lose.

A useful test for any digital plan: if the primary email were unavailable tomorrow, what else becomes unreachable? Whatever that list contains needs its own route in, not a route that runs through the mailbox.

The setting that outranks your will

State law supplies the consent that the federal statute requires, and it does so through a rule most people find surprising: a direction you give inside the platform's own tool beats a contrary direction in your will. Sahvelo has found this in nearly identical words wherever it has read it, because these states adopted the same uniform act.

• A direction given through an online tool the platform provides overrides a contrary direction in a will, trust or power of attorney — provided the tool lets you change or delete the direction at any time.
• If you have not used such a tool, or the platform does not offer one, you may give or withhold permission in a will, trust, power of attorney or other record instead.
• Either way, your direction overrides a contrary term buried in the terms of service you agreed to.^{Source 2Source 4Source 6Source 8}

Read that ordering again, because it inverts the usual hierarchy. The will is the fallback. The platform setting is the primary instrument, it takes minutes, and it costs nothing.

It also cuts the other way. Someone who nominated a person in a platform tool years ago and later wrote a will naming somebody else has, in these four states, left the platform setting in charge. Anyone who has configured one of these tools should check who is still named.

The override is a rule about access to records, and it is narrower than it sounds. It does not decide who receives the money in an account, and on an employer retirement plan it does not apply at all. The next section is the boundary, and reading the override without it is a frequent way to get this wrong.

What the override does not reach

The override rule is powerful and narrow at the same time, and the narrowness is written into the statute's own definition of the thing it operates on. All four states define a digital asset as an electronic record in which an individual has a right or interest — and then exclude the underlying asset or liability unless that asset is itself an electronic record.

A digital asset is the record, not the thing the record describes. A bank balance, a brokerage holding and a retirement account are all reached through a login, and none of them is a digital asset. Nothing set in a platform tool, and nothing written in a will, changes who is entitled to that money.^{Source: A.R.S. §14-13102(10) — definition of digital asset, excluding the underlying asset (opens in a new tab)•Source: Cal. Prob. Code §871(h) — definition of digital asset, excluding the underlying asset (opens in a new tab)•Source: Fla. Stat. §740.002(9) — definition of digital asset, excluding the underlying asset (opens in a new tab)•Source: N.Y. EPTL §13-A-1(i) — definition of digital asset, excluding the underlying asset (opens in a new tab)•}

Money in an account follows the account, not the login

Who receives what is in a financial account is decided by the beneficiary, payable-on-death or transfer-on-death designation on it, by survivorship where the account is jointly held, or — where there is none of those — by the estate. The digital-asset statute decides who may see the account. The designation decides who receives what is in it. These routinely name different people, and when they do, both are working correctly: the executor reads the statements and somebody else banks the money.

An employer retirement plan is decided by federal law, not by this statute

A 401(k) is the sharpest case, because the login looks like every other login. The plan administrator is required to pay in accordance with the plan's own documents, so the designation on file decides the money. On a typical plan the surviving spouse is the default beneficiary, and naming anyone else takes that spouse's written consent, witnessed by a plan representative or a notary. And ERISA supersedes state laws insofar as they relate to an employee benefit plan — a state digital-assets statute is such a state law. An ordinary IRA is not an ERISA plan, which is why the same household can get different answers for two accounts that look identical on a screen.^{Source: 29 U.S.C. §1104(a)(1)(D) — the duty to act in accordance with plan documents (opens in a new tab)•Source: 29 U.S.C. §1055 — survivor annuities and the spousal consent requirement (opens in a new tab)•Source: 29 U.S.C. §1144(a) — ERISA preemption of state laws relating to a plan (opens in a new tab)•Source: 29 C.F.R. §2510.3-2(d) — individual retirement accounts excluded from Title I (opens in a new tab)•}

The practical instruction is short. For anything holding money, check the beneficiary designation on the account itself. That is the document that controls it, and it is not the will, not the platform tool, and not the password.

A fiduciary gets the person's rights and no more

The statutes say this directly, in a section families rarely reach. A fiduciary or designated recipient is given no new or expanded rights other than those held by the user — so an account the person could not have transferred does not become transferable because a court issued letters. The same section provides that access may be modified or eliminated by federal law, which is the statute pointing at its own ceiling: it is why the Stored Communications Act still governs message content, and why federal retirement law is not displaced here.^{Source: A.R.S. §14-13105(B)-(C) — no new or expanded rights; federal law may eliminate access (opens in a new tab)•Source: Cal. Prob. Code §874 — terms-of-service agreement preserved; no new or expanded rights (opens in a new tab)•Source: Fla. Stat. §740.004 — terms-of-service agreement preserved; no new or expanded rights (opens in a new tab)•Source: N.Y. EPTL §13-A-2.3 — terms-of-service agreement; no new or expanded rights (opens in a new tab)•}

A work account is outside the statute altogether

Arizona, California and New York each provide that their digital-asset rules do not apply to a digital asset of an employer used by an employee in the ordinary course of the employer's business. A work email account, a company file store or an employer-issued device is therefore not reached by the online-tool override or by the disclosure procedure at all — that material is the employer's to release or withhold under its own policies, and the route to it is a conversation with the employer rather than a court instrument. Sahvelo has not located Florida's equivalent provision and does not assert one.^{Source: A.R.S. §14-13103 — applicability: user residence, and the employer carve-out (opens in a new tab)•Source: Cal. Prob. Code §872 — applicability: user residence, employer carve-out, and the 2025 extension to agents (opens in a new tab)•Source: N.Y. EPTL §13-A-2.1 — applicability: user residence, and the employer carve-out (opens in a new tab)•}

Which state's rule applies is settled by where the account holder lived, not by where the platform is based. Arizona, California and New York each apply their statute to a custodian if the user resided in that state at the time of death, so a family administering the estate applies their own state's version to a company headquartered anywhere.^{Source: A.R.S. §14-13103 — applicability: user residence, and the employer carve-out (opens in a new tab)•Source: Cal. Prob. Code §872 — applicability: user residence, employer carve-out, and the 2025 extension to agents (opens in a new tab)•Source: N.Y. EPTL §13-A-2.1 — applicability: user residence, and the employer carve-out (opens in a new tab)•}

Having the phone is not having the data

Account access and device access are different problems and they fail differently. A family can hold the phone, own it outright as estate property, have letters from a court — and still not be able to unlock it. Modern device encryption is not a customer-service setting a manufacturer can override on request, and a fiduciary with unimpeachable legal authority can be stopped by a passcode.

The practical consequence for planning is that anything stored only on a device, and nowhere else, is at risk in a way that cloud-stored material is not. Photographs that were never backed up, notes, an authenticator app that generates the second factor for everything else.

An authenticator app on a locked phone is the quiet catastrophe in a lot of digital estates. Two-factor authentication protects the accounts beautifully and can lock the family out permanently. Recovery codes, stored somewhere other than the phone, are the fix and take ten minutes.

What is worth setting up, in order

1. The email account first. It is the master key: almost every password reset in your life runs through it, so an executor who can reach the email can reach most other things, and one who cannot is stuck at every door.
2. The phone. Losing access to the handset breaks the two-factor codes that guard accounts the family can otherwise reach. Someone needs the passcode, and biometric unlocking dies with the owner.
3. A password manager with an emergency-access or legacy feature, which solves credentials in one place and is far better than a list.
4. The platform legacy tools, on each account that offers one.
5. A short written note saying which of these you have set up and who is named, kept with the will rather than inside the accounts.

Do not write your passwords into your will. A will admitted to probate becomes a public record in most states, and the credentials will be stale long before it is read.

Why sharing a password is not the answer

The obvious shortcut is to give someone the login. It is understandable, it is common, and it has three problems worth knowing before relying on it.

• Credentials go stale. A password changed in the intervening years leaves the family exactly where they started.
• Using someone else's account after their death can breach the terms of service, and — depending on the account and the circumstances — raise questions under computer-access laws. That is a risk to the person you are trying to help.
• Two-factor authentication defeats it anyway. Without the phone, the password alone is often useless.

The platform tools exist precisely because the password shortcut does not work. Using them converts an act that looks like impersonation into an authorized transfer.

Decisions worth making deliberately

The tools ask what should happen, and the default answers are rarely what people would choose on reflection.

• Photographs and files: usually the thing families most want, and the thing most often locked in a cloud account nobody can open.
• Messages and email: worth thinking about honestly. Some people want their correspondence preserved; some very much do not, and withholding consent is as valid a direction as granting it.
• Social profiles: memorialize, delete, or hand over. Each platform offers a different combination, and doing nothing usually means the profile stays live and keeps suggesting itself to friends.
• Purchases and subscriptions: often non-transferable by license, whatever the platform tool does. A large media library may simply end.
• Anything with real value: cryptocurrency, domain names, an online business, a monetized channel. These need naming specifically, because the tool moves access and something else moves ownership — a beneficiary designation where the account has one, and otherwise the will. An account that holds money is the case where the tool moves the least.

Cryptocurrency held in a self-custody wallet is the one case where losing the credential is genuinely final. No platform, court or executor can recover it. If any exists, the recovery phrase needs a documented, tested route to the right person.^{Source 10}

Where access and ownership are the same thing

For most accounts, authority eventually beats access: a platform has a process, a fiduciary produces documents, the matter is resolved slowly. Two categories break that pattern and need different planning.

Self-custodied digital assets

Where cryptocurrency is held in a wallet the owner controls rather than at an exchange, the private key or recovery phrase is not evidence of ownership — it is the ownership. There is no customer-service department to present letters to and no reset. If the recovery phrase is lost, the asset is lost, and no legal authority recovers it. An exchange-held balance behaves like an ordinary account with a company to deal with; a self-custodied one does not, and the distinction decides everything about how it must be planned for.

Domains, websites and anything a business runs on

A domain expires on a date regardless of who died. So do hosting, advertising accounts and the payment cards behind them. Where a business, a shop or a creator's income depends on infrastructure in one person's name, the risk is not that the family cannot read the messages — it is that the thing stops working while the estate is being sorted out. These deserve a named successor and a renewal date somebody else knows about.

Decide what should happen, not just who gets in

An inventory of accounts is only half a plan. The useful half is what you want done with each one, because the answers differ and nobody can guess them.

• Transfer it — a domain, a business account, a shared subscription somebody else relies on.
• Preserve and hand over the contents — photographs, documents, correspondence worth keeping.
• Download and archive, then close. Most cloud services can export.
• Memorialize it, where the platform offers that and you want the account to remain visible.
• Close it quietly.
• Delete it, and say so explicitly if that is what you want.

Subscriptions are the small, grinding version of this problem. They keep charging a card attached to an account nobody can reach, on an estate nobody has finished administering. A list of recurring payments — not passwords, just what and where — saves a family months of small irritations.

When there was no plan

Most families reading this are on the other side of it, working with whatever exists.

• No inventory: start with the primary email and the card statements. A year of renewal notices and receipts reconstructs most of a digital life.
• You have the password: it gets you in and it does not make you authorized. Where the account matters — financial, business, anything contested — the platform's process and the fiduciary route are the safe road even though they are slower.
• You have the phone but cannot unlock it: treat anything stored only there as at risk, and pursue the cloud account rather than the device where a backup may exist.
• The platform will only close the account: this is common, and it is why the catalog-versus-content distinction below matters. Ask specifically what can be released rather than accepting the first answer.
• The legacy contact and the will disagree: the setting inside the account generally wins. That is the override, and it surprises families who assumed the will controlled everything.
• You believe crypto exists but cannot find recovery information: search for the seed phrase as a physical object — paper, a metal plate, a safe deposit box — because if it was self-custodied there is no other route.