Digital Legacy: Who Gets Your Passwords and Accounts

When leaving this world, modern people leave their descendants not only apartments, cars and record collections, but also a digital legacy. Photos and videos in cloud storage, subscriptions to streaming services, bitcoins in accounts and a VKontakte account – we tell you how to manage all this wealth.

What is digital heritage?

The Russian legislation does not yet have the term “digital heritage”, and this area is poorly regulated. However, it is generally believed that digital heritage includes:

• personal data and social media profiles;
• photos, videos, documents in cloud storage (Google Drive, iCloud, Dropbox);
• email (confirmations and accesses will continue to be sent to it);
• subscriptions and digital collections: Netflix, Spotify, Yandex Books and others;
• access to online banking, electronic and crypto wallets;
• rights to domains, blogs, websites, YouTube channels and income from them;
• electronic correspondence.

As a rule, non-property rights and intangible benefits are not included in the inheritance . That is, even direct heirs cannot claim access to the deceased’s account if there is nothing valuable there, just photos of cats. 

It will also be difficult to gain access to the deceased’s correspondence in messengers and email inboxes – according to Russian laws, its inviolability is protected even after death. At the same time, the ability to access the deceased’s email can be critically important – passwords and codes for connecting and disconnecting other services will probably be sent there. 

However, if a digital asset can be classified as property (for example, cryptocurrency or income from a YouTube channel), then it can be inherited by will, by inheritance law, or by court order. In theory. In practice, however, everything is more complicated: many foreign platforms do not interact with Russian inheritance law.

With crypto , things are even more complicated. Not only is it almost impossible to log into a crypto wallet or an account on a crypto exchange without a password, even if the court recognizes the legal rights of the heir. The main difficulty is that in order to formalize inheritance rights, it is necessary to prove that the property actually belonged to the deceased. But virtual wallets are anonymous. No one can issue an official piece of paper stating that crypto wallet number such-and-such belongs to citizen Maria Ivanova. 

So if you want your loved ones to have access to your digital inheritance, you will have to take care of this issue yourself while you are alive and well. 

Why it is important to manage your digital legacy in advance

Is it possible to leave everything as is? Yes, but there are several serious reasons to keep all logins and passwords for the heirs.

• To give your loved ones access to your photos and videos that they would like to keep.
• So that they can disable your social media accounts or continue to operate them.
• So that they can withdraw funds from your e-wallets and accounts if you want to leave the money with them.
• So that they can turn off paid subscriptions – many of them will renew automatically.
• To prevent scammers from using an inactive account for fakes or hacks.
• To avoid legal problems if the digital property has real value.

Who can become a digital heir?

You can appoint anyone as a digital heir: a friend, a relative, a partner. Or even a stranger – for example, a representative of a law firm. 

There may be several such heirs if you decide to distribute your digital inheritance: for example, your best friend will receive access to your social media accounts, your sister will receive access to your crypto wallet, and your business partner will receive rights to administer your coffee shop’s website.

It would be good if all your digital heirs were at least minimally tech-savvy and knew how to use Internet services without outside help. 

What to Include in a Digital Heritage: A Checklist

• Password for a computer or laptop, PIN codes for smartphones.
• Apple ID, email logins and passwords.
• Logins, passwords and seed phrases from banking services, electronic wallets and accounts on crypto exchanges.
• Logins and passwords for cloud storage (Google Drive, iCloud, Dropbox).
• Logins and passwords for social network accounts.
• Access to accounts with a paid subscription (otherwise the heirs will not be able to disable it).
• Access to online games, especially if you have invested real money in them. This way, heirs will be able to sell game artifacts if there are valuable items among them.
• Detailed instructions on what to do with each of these accounts: delete or save as memory, how to withdraw money, what to publish on social networks. 
• Contacts of people involved with your digital legacy. For example, if you have a website that needs to be maintained in the future, leave the contacts of the admin and designer. 

How to Make a Digital Will

Record all wishes regarding digital legacy

You can simply agree with your loved ones, or you can draw up a document that specifies what accounts you have, who you trust to access them, what needs to be deleted, and what needs to be kept. This instruction is usually drawn up in free form and certified by a notary or included as a separate clause in a regular will.

Of course, you shouldn’t include logins and passwords in your will. It’s enough to write who you’re leaving your YouTube channel or bitcoins in your ByBit account to. And the access details themselves should be saved in a safe place.

Save accesses in the password manager

A notebook in a desk drawer or a document on a desktop is not considered a safe place. Accesses should be stored where they will definitely not get lost or fall into the hands of intruders. 

For example, in services like 1Password (paid), Bitwarden or Dashlane (free). Or using built-in password managers – Apple’s Keychain, Google Chrome’s account manager.

Set up a digital successor

This is an additional measure that will allow you to automatically transfer partial access to your loved ones to the most important services. Today, several platforms have this feature.

Google: “Just in case” feature

You can connect it in your account. To assign an account heir, add their email (not necessarily gmail.com) and phone number. You can select up to 10 people and distribute which Google services they will have access to.

To start the function, you need to set the period after which the system will recognize the account as inactive (from 3 to 12 months). To activate the function, you need to specify your phone number. Before starting to count this period, Google will send you several messages.

Apple: Digital Legacy feature

This option is located in the Apple ID settings under “Password & Security”. With it, if the iCloud owner dies, his relatives will have access to the account – however, only for three years. You can select up to five such heirs from your contact list.

After this, you will receive a key – a QR code or a combination of symbols that must be transferred to the future digital heir.

To access your data, your heirs will need to contact Apple support and provide an access key and your death certificate. After that, your Apple ID account will be disabled, and your heir will have access to its mirror – a stripped-down version that will not contain payment data, cards linked to Apple Pay, and paid subscriptions. 

Facebook*: Guardian feature

Here the user can choose from among friends a Guardian – a person who will have access to the public part of the profile information. The function can be connected in the “Account Management” section: Settings and privacy → Settings → Account center → Personal information → Account ownership and management → Set memorable status.

After the death of the account owner, the Keeper will need to write to support, provide a scan of their document and death certificate, and wait a couple of days. The Keeper will not have access to the messenger, will not be able to delete or edit old posts or correspond with other users – only publish new posts, accept friend requests, and change their profile photo. If desired, the Keeper can delete the account. 

If there is no Guardian, relatives can contact support, present a death certificate and proof of relationship (for example, a birth certificate or marriage certificate) and ask to either delete the account or make it a memorial account – in this case, a note about the owner’s death will appear next to the name, and it will be impossible to log into the account. 

What to do with other social networks and services

Yandex

Article 23 of the Constitution of the Russian Federation guarantees every citizen the right to privacy and correspondence. Yandex, as a Russian company, is subject to these rules, so it will not be possible to gain access to an account after the owner’s death. The only way is to privately leave the login and password to relatives while still alive. If this is not done, the heirs will only be able to block the account – to do this, you will need to contact support and present a death certificate.

“VKontakte” and “Odnoklassniki”

As with Yandex, it is impossible to access the deceased’s account on these social networks. It can be deleted or blocked, leaving it as a digital memorial. In this case, other users will no longer be able to write to him, leave messages on the wall or leave comments. 

To block or delete an account, you need to write to technical support and present a death certificate. However, after 6 months, an inactive VKontakte account will still be deleted automatically. 

Instagram*

This social network also does not have a guardian function. The account of the deceased can only be deleted (only the closest relatives can do this) or made memorial (anyone). For both actions, you need to write to support and provide a death certificate, and for deletion – a document confirming close kinship. 

What digital assets cannot be inherited

E-books, movies and other digital content. You do not own them, but rather borrow them from the service to watch. Many services even indicate in user agreements that the client does not have the right to share access to the account with third parties. 

Bonuses in loyalty systems. Miles, bonus points and other bonuses cannot be inherited, even if you pass on your account login and password to the heir.

What to do in case of death of a loved one

1. Collect the documents that may be requested by the service support: scans of the death certificate, a document that confirms that you are not a stranger to the deceased (marriage certificate, birth certificate, etc.), a document confirming your identity and the identity of the deceased. Foreign services may require a notarized translation of all these papers into English.
2. Make a list of all social networks, email services, e-wallets and platforms that the person used. Mark which accounts you want to delete and which ones you want to memorialize. 
3. Write a cover letter. Just in case, translate it into English if the deceased used foreign services. Here is an example of a cover letter for the support service in Russian and English:

1. Write to the support of each service one by one. Many of them (for example, Odnoklassniki) have special forms in case of death of the account owner.