What happens to your online accounts when you die

The accounts nobody thinks about until it's too late

The average person today maintains somewhere between fifty and one hundred online accounts. A handful of those accounts contain things that genuinely matter: twenty years of photographs, financial records, messages from people who are no longer alive, shared documents that a business depends on. Most people have never thought about what happens to any of it.

The answer, in almost every case, is that it gets locked. The people you leave behind submit request forms to platforms they have never contacted before, wait weeks for automated responses, provide death certificates that get lost in queues, and still, often, are told no. Each platform has its own policy, its own timeline, and its own definition of what it will and will not hand over to a grieving family.

The good news is that this is entirely solvable, provided you do a small amount of preparation while you still can. This guide covers the major platforms one by one, then explains the fastest way to handle all of them at once.

Email (Gmail, Outlook, ProtonMail)

Email is the master key to your entire digital life. Almost every other account (bank, social media, subscriptions, government services) uses your email address as the recovery option. If your family cannot access your email, they cannot access almost anything else through normal channels.

Gmail offers the most proactive tool: Inactive Account Manager, found in your Google Account settings. You can configure it to notify a trusted contact after a period of inactivity (3, 6, 12, or 18 months) and optionally grant them access to download your data. This is the closest thing Google has to an inheritance mechanism, and it is free to set up right now.

Microsoft (Outlook, Hotmail) does not have an equivalent proactive tool. Family members can submit a Next of Kin request with a death certificate, but Microsoft typically closes the account rather than transferring access, and the process can take months. The practical answer is to leave login credentials in a secure capsule rather than relying on Microsoft's grief process.

ProtonMail is end-to-end encrypted, which means that even with a death certificate, Proton cannot grant access, because the key lives only with the account holder. If you use ProtonMail for anything important, leaving the password in an encrypted capsule is not optional; it is the only path to access.

Facebook

Facebook has the most developed posthumous account system of any major platform. You have two options: memorialization or deletion.

Memorialization turns your profile into a space for people to share memories. The word 'Remembering' appears next to your name. You can designate a legacy contact, a specific person who gains limited management rights: they can pin a tribute post, accept new friend requests, and update your profile picture. They cannot log in as you, read your messages, see your private content, or remove your existing posts.

To set up a legacy contact: go to Settings, then Memorialization Settings. You can also request that your account be deleted entirely after death, which can be the cleaner choice for people who would rather leave no trace than leave a static profile.

Without any preparation, a family member can submit a memorialization request to Facebook with a death certificate. The process usually takes a few weeks and does not grant any access to private content.

Instagram

Instagram's options are more limited than Facebook's, despite being owned by the same company. There is no legacy contact on Instagram. Family members can request that an account be memorialized or removed, both of which require submitting proof of death through a form.

A memorialized Instagram account can no longer be logged into, will not appear in the 'People you may know' feature, and cannot have its password reset. The posts, photos, and videos remain visible according to whatever privacy settings were in place at the time. There is no mechanism for a family member to download the content through official channels.

If your Instagram contains photos or content that your family will want to preserve, the practical solution is to download your data archive now (via Settings, then Your Activity, then Download your information) and store it somewhere accessible, or document it in a capsule alongside your other digital instructions.

Apple (iCloud, Photos, Messages)

Apple introduced Digital Legacy with iOS 15.2. It is the most useful inheritance feature any platform has built, and almost nobody has configured it.

Digital Legacy lets you designate up to five people as legacy contacts. When you die, each contact can request access using a special access key (which you generate when you add them) plus your death certificate. Apple then grants them temporary access to download photos, files, notes, messages, and most iCloud data. The access expires after three years.

To set it up: go to Settings, then your name, then Legacy Contact, then Add Legacy Contact. Share the access key with each person you add. Save it somewhere they can find it, or better, include it in an encrypted capsule addressed to them.

Without a legacy contact configured, Apple cannot grant family access to an iCloud account, regardless of relationship or documentation. The encryption architecture does not permit it.

Google (Drive, Photos, YouTube)

Beyond Gmail, Google holds a significant portion of most people's digital life: years of photos in Google Photos, documents in Drive, a browsing history in Chrome, a YouTube channel, location history going back years. All of it sits behind a single Google account.

Inactive Account Manager is the tool you need. After a configurable period of inactivity, Google will notify up to ten trusted contacts and can automatically share your data with them. You can choose exactly which data to share with each person: Photos, Drive, YouTube, and so on. You can also instruct Google to delete the account entirely after notifying your contacts.

Configure it now at myaccount.google.com, then Data & Privacy, then Make a plan for your digital legacy. It takes about ten minutes and removes the single biggest point of failure in most people's digital estate.

Subscriptions and services

Netflix, Spotify, Amazon, cloud storage providers, software subscriptions: none of these platforms have meaningful posthumous policies. They will continue billing a card until the card is cancelled or the account is closed, and they will grant access to nobody except the account holder.

For subscriptions, the practical task is different from the social media task: you do not need to plan for inheritance, you need to plan for cancellation. Your family needs to know which subscriptions exist and how to cancel them. A list in an encrypted capsule (even just the service name, the email address used to sign up, and any relevant login) is enough to let someone work through the list methodically.

Services with real value (a cloud storage account holding important files, an Amazon account that still has meaningful gift card credit, a domain registrar where a business domain lives) warrant more detailed instructions, including the login credentials themselves.

The fastest way to prepare everything at once

Reading through this guide, you may be keeping a running list of things to configure, policies to read, and forms to find. That list is useful, but it has a ceiling. Platform policies change. Legacy contacts need to be updated when relationships change. And none of the native tools give you a place to write plain-language instructions alongside the credentials your family will actually need.

The most reliable approach is to create a dedicated digital accounts capsule in Final Capsule. Inside it: a complete account map (platform, email address, password manager entry name, or login), the access keys for your Apple legacy contacts, instructions on which accounts to close and which to keep, your wishes for social media profiles, and any subscriptions that need cancelling. The entire capsule is end-to-end encrypted using AES-256-GCM, and nobody can read it until your SafeGuards confirm delivery should happen. Unlike a spreadsheet in a drawer or a note in your phone, it cannot be found early, cannot be lost, and does not require anyone to remember where it is.

Configure the native tools too. Google's Inactive Account Manager and Apple's Digital Legacy are genuinely worth setting up. But treat the capsule as the single source of truth: the place where everything is documented, with context, in your own words.

Your checklist

1. Set up Google's Inactive Account Manager with at least one trusted contact
2. Add a legacy contact in Apple's Digital Legacy settings; share the access key securely
3. Set your Facebook legacy contact or deletion preference in Memorialization Settings
4. Download your Instagram data archive if it contains photos you want preserved
5. List all active subscriptions and note which email address each uses
6. Create an encrypted capsule with a full account map, login instructions, and your wishes for each platform
7. Name a Confidant to receive the capsule and a SafeGuard to vouch when the time comes
8. Tell your Confidant the capsule exists. They do not need to know the contents, only that there is a plan