Custodian (of a digital asset)

What it means

The statutes the states adopted for access to somebody else's accounts do not talk about Google or Apple or a bank. They talk about a custodian, which they define as anyone who carries, maintains, processes, receives or stores a digital asset of a user. The email provider is one. So is the photo service, the cloud drive, the password manager and the exchange holding a cryptocurrency balance.

The word matters because it is the custodian, not the family, who decides how to answer — and the statute tells it how to decide. It sets an order: what the account holder recorded in the provider's own online tool comes first, then what they wrote in a will, trust or power of attorney, then the provider's terms of service last.

A custodian is also allowed to answer narrowly. It may hand over a full copy, a partial copy, or access sufficient to perform the task, and it may refuse to hand over a deleted asset. What it cannot do is treat its own terms of service as the whole answer where the account holder said otherwise.

Why it matters

It names who the request goes to. Families write to the wrong party, or to nobody, because the will names an executor and nothing names the company.

It is also the reason the account's own settings outrank the will: the custodian is instructed to look there first.

When you are likely to meet it

• When a provider replies to an executor's request in the language of the statute.
• When deciding whether to write to a company at all, or to look for a setting inside the account.
• When a password manager or an exchange is holding something the family cannot value.

Related terms

• Catalog of electronic communicationsThe list of who was written to and when — as distinct from what the messages said.
• Content of an electronic communicationWhat the messages actually said — the half of a digital account that is hardest to reach, and impossible to arrange for after capacity is gone.
• Digital assetAn online account or file that has value or meaning — email, photographs, cloud storage, domains, currency accounts, loyalty balances.
• Legacy contactA person you name inside an online account itself, whom the provider will let reach it after you die. It usually beats anything written in a will.
• Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets ActThe law, adopted in most states, that gives an executor, trustee or agent a route to a person's digital accounts.

Official sources

The authority this page describes, at the agency that publishes it. Sahvelo does not restate a rule from a secondary source.

• Uniform Law Commission — the uniform acts, and which states have enacted each (opens in a new tab)

Sahvelo guidance that uses this

• Getting into a parent's accounts
• Digital legacy