What Is a Digital Legacy and How Do I Create One? Complete Guide
A digital legacy is everything you leave online: email, photos, social media, financial and shopping accounts, files and subscriptions. A digital legacy plan says who should handle each account and what should happen to it. The quickest wins take minutes: name a legacy contact on Facebook and Instagram, set up Google's Inactive Account Manager, and add a Legacy Contact to your Apple Account. Then list your accounts somewhere your executor can find them — never in the will itself.
What counts as a digital legacy?
- Social media: Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, X and others.
- Email and cloud storage: Gmail, Outlook, iCloud, Google Drive, OneDrive.
- Photos and videos in Google Photos, iCloud or on devices.
- Money: online banking, payment apps, and cryptocurrency wallets.
- Creative work and property: blogs, channels, domain names, websites.
- Subscriptions that keep billing until someone cancels them.
Why plan ahead?
Without a plan, families often cannot get into accounts at all. Apple, for example, requires a court order naming the heir before it releases data from an account with no Legacy Contact, and even then it cannot decrypt end-to-end encrypted data. Microsoft freezes Outlook.com and OneDrive after a year of inactivity and releases a deceased user's data only in response to a subpoena or court order. Cryptocurrency held in your own wallet is lost for good if no one has the keys.
The issue is growing: researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute projected in 2019 that at least 1.4 billion Facebook users will die before 2100, and that the dead could outnumber the living on the platform within decades.
How to create a digital legacy plan
Step 1: Make an inventory
List your accounts and devices, what each one holds, and what you want done with it (keep, download, memorialize, close). A password manager with an emergency-access feature can hold the logins. Keep the inventory up to date.
Step 2: Choose a digital executor
This can be your estate executor or someone more comfortable with technology. Many U.S. states have adopted the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act (RUFADAA), a model law approved by the Uniform Law Commission in 2015 that lets you give a fiduciary access to your digital accounts — including through the settings an online service offers. Ask an estate attorney how your state handles it.
Step 3: Turn on each platform's legacy settings
| Platform | Setting | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Legacy contact (memorialization settings) | After memorialization, your contact can pin a post, update profile and cover photos, request removal and — if you allow it — download what you shared. They cannot log in or read messages. | |
| Legacy contact (18+) or "delete after death" | Your contact can update the profile picture and manage tags but cannot post or read messages; you can choose deletion instead of memorialization. | |
| Inactive Account Manager | You pick an inactivity period and up to 10 trusted contacts who receive a message and, if you choose, selected data. Google may delete accounts inactive for two years when no plan is set up. | |
| Apple | Legacy Contact (iOS/iPadOS 15.2 or later, macOS 12.1 or later) | Each contact gets an access key; with it and a death certificate they can access photos, messages, notes, files and backups — not purchased media or Keychain passwords. |
Step 4: Store the plan safely
Do not put passwords in your will: wills become public in probate. Keep the inventory in a password manager or a sealed document, reference it in your estate plan, and tell your executor where to find it.
Step 5: Decide how you want to be remembered online
You may want a memorialized profile, an online memorial page, or neither. See our guide to online memorial sites and what happens to each account after death.
Digital legacy and estate planning
A digital legacy plan complements a will; it does not replace it. Review both when your life changes, and include your digital wishes in your funeral plan (see our pre-planning guide). Our free AI Planning Assistant can help you draft a checklist to share with your family.
Sources
- Meta Help Center: Legacy contacts on Facebook
- Digital Death Directory (University of Manitoba): Instagram
- Google Account Help: Inactive Account Manager
- Apple Support: How to add a Legacy Contact for your Apple Account
- Apple Support: How to request access to a deceased family member's Apple Account
- Microsoft Support: Accessing Outlook.com, OneDrive and other Microsoft services when someone has died
- University of Oxford: Digital graveyards — are the dead taking over Facebook? (Öhman & Watson, Oxford Internet Institute, 2019)
- Uniform Law Commission: Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act, Revised (2015)
People Also Ask
What is a digital legacy?
The online accounts, files, photos, social media and other digital assets a person leaves behind. A digital legacy plan says who should handle each one and whether it should be kept, downloaded, memorialized or closed.
Can I include digital assets in my will?
You can refer to them, but do not list passwords in a will — wills become public in probate. Keep an inventory in a password manager or sealed document, reference it in your estate plan, and tell your executor where it is.
What happens to social media accounts when someone dies?
It depends on the platform. Facebook and Instagram can memorialize or remove accounts and let you name a legacy contact; LinkedIn can memorialize a profile; X deactivates accounts at the request of verified family or an estate representative and does not memorialize them.