What Happens to Your Online Accounts When You Die?

2026-02-17

Nobody thinks about their Gmail password as part of their estate. But when someone dies, their digital life doesn't die with them. Email keeps arriving. Subscriptions keep charging. Social media profiles keep collecting birthday wishes from friends who haven't heard the news. Cloud storage holds decades of irreplaceable family photos — locked behind a password that went to the grave.

For the family left behind, the experience is almost always the same: a slow-motion discovery that the person they lost had dozens — sometimes hundreds — of online accounts, and that accessing any of them is far harder than they ever imagined.

Here's what actually happens to your online accounts when you die, platform by platform, and what you can do right now to prevent your family from being locked out.

The default: nothing happens (and that's the problem)

When someone dies, their online accounts don't automatically close, freeze, or transfer. Without intervention, most accounts simply continue to exist in a kind of digital limbo.

Email keeps accumulating. Subscription services keep billing the credit card on file until it expires or the bank closes the account. Cloud storage (Google Drive, iCloud, Dropbox) holds files indefinitely — or until the storage quota triggers an automatic purge. Social media profiles remain visible, collecting comments and friend requests.

This limbo creates three immediate problems for families:

Financial drain. Recurring charges — streaming services, cloud storage, software subscriptions, gym memberships, app subscriptions — continue to hit the deceased person's credit card or bank account. Families often don't discover these charges for months. Even a modest collection of subscriptions can drain hundreds of dollars before anyone intervenes.

Security exposure. An unmonitored email account is a goldmine for identity thieves. Scammers specifically target deceased individuals because nobody is watching the accounts. Password reset links, bank statements, and tax documents keep arriving in an inbox no one is checking.

Irreversible data loss. Google, Apple, and Microsoft all have inactivity policies. If no one accesses an account for a certain period (ranging from one to three years depending on the platform), the account may be permanently deleted — along with every photo, email, and document it contains.

What happens on each major platform

Google (Gmail, Drive, Photos, YouTube)

Google has one of the better-designed systems for handling accounts after death: the Inactive Account Manager. If the account holder set this up before dying, Google will automatically notify designated contacts after a specified period of inactivity (3, 6, 12, or 18 months) and can optionally share account data with them or delete the account entirely.

If the Inactive Account Manager was not set up — which is the case for the vast majority of accounts — the family has limited options. Google offers a process for requesting data from a deceased person's account, but it requires proof of death, proof of legal authority (executor documentation), and Google's own review process. Google may share some data but will not grant full account access or hand over the password.

The critical detail: Google has the right to refuse requests, and they frequently do. Their terms of service treat the account as a license, not property. You don't inherit a Gmail account the way you inherit a house.

For a complete walkthrough on setting up the Inactive Account Manager, see our Google Inactive Account Manager setup guide.

Apple (iCloud, Apple ID, Photos, iTunes)

Apple introduced the Legacy Contact feature in iOS 15.2 and macOS 12.1. If the account holder added a Legacy Contact, that person can request access to nearly all iCloud data (photos, notes, mail, contacts, files) using a special access key and a copy of the death certificate.

Without a Legacy Contact set up, Apple's process is difficult. The family must provide a death certificate, proof of relationship, and often a court order. Apple may provide access to iCloud data but will not unlock a device (iPhone, iPad, Mac) that is protected by a passcode or Activation Lock. Apple's position is firm: device security and privacy are paramount, even after death.

The critical detail: If your parent's iPhone is locked with a passcode you don't know, and they didn't set up a Legacy Contact, that phone's data may be permanently inaccessible — even with a death certificate and a court order. The 2FA codes sent to that locked phone also become inaccessible, which can cascade into lockouts on every other account that uses that phone for verification.

Facebook and Instagram (Meta)

Facebook offers two options for a deceased person's account: memorialization or deletion.

A memorialized account displays "Remembering" next to the person's name, preserves the timeline for friends to share memories, and prevents anyone from logging in. If the account holder designated a Legacy Contact, that person can manage limited aspects of the memorialized profile (pinning a tribute post, responding to friend requests) but cannot read private messages or log in as the person.

The family can also request permanent deletion of the account. This requires proof of death and proof of relationship.

Instagram follows a similar process, with memorialization and deletion as the two options.

The critical detail: Once an account is memorialized, it cannot be un-memorialized. If the family wants to download photos, videos, or other data from the profile, they must do so before requesting memorialization. Facebook does offer a "Download Your Information" tool, but it requires logging in to the account — which requires the password.

Banks and financial accounts

Financial institutions have well-established procedures for handling accounts after death, but these procedures are built for in-person visits with legal documentation, not for online access.

In most cases, the bank will freeze online access to the deceased's accounts once they receive official notification of the death. The executor must present a death certificate, letters testamentary (or equivalent legal documentation), and government-issued ID to gain access.

The critical detail: If bills are set to auto-pay from the deceased's account, freezing that account stops all payments — including the mortgage, utilities, and insurance. The executor needs to identify and redirect these payments immediately, which requires knowing which accounts exist in the first place.

Subscription services (Netflix, Spotify, Adobe, etc.)

Subscription services generally require the account holder to cancel. Most don't have a "deceased user" process. The practical approach for families is usually:

Identify all active subscriptions (check credit card and bank statements)
Cancel the credit card to stop charges
Contact each service individually to close the account

This sounds simple until you realize the average person has 12-15 active subscriptions, and many of them were signed up with an email address the family can't access.

The law won't save you (in most cases)

Many families assume that being the legal executor or having power of attorney automatically grants them access to digital accounts. It doesn't.

In the United States, the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act (RUFADAA) — adopted in some form by most states — establishes a hierarchy for digital asset access. The account holder's own platform settings (like Google's Inactive Account Manager) override everything, including the will. If no platform settings exist, specific provisions in legal documents apply. If neither exists, the platform's terms of service control — and most terms of service default to privacy and denial of access.

In the UK, the situation is murkier. The Computer Misuse Act 1990 technically makes it a criminal offense to use another person's login credentials without authorization — even after their death. There is no comprehensive digital assets law equivalent to RUFADAA.

Canada, Australia, and New Zealand each have their own patchwork of rules, with most jurisdictions lacking specific digital asset legislation.

The practical reality across all these countries is the same: legal authority does not equal technical access. A court order tells Google they should give you the data. It doesn't give you the password, bypass 2FA, or unlock the phone.

What you can do right now

The best time to organize digital accounts is while the account holder is alive and can participate. The core steps:

1. Set up platform legacy tools. Google's Inactive Account Manager and Apple's Legacy Contact are free, take 10 minutes each, and solve the biggest access problems proactively. Facebook's Legacy Contact is also worth setting up. These platform-level settings legally override everything else under RUFADAA.

2. Create a digital asset inventory. Document every account — email, financial, social media, cloud storage, subscriptions, devices — along with login credentials and 2FA methods. This doesn't have to be a spreadsheet; a structured checklist works better for most families.

3. Document device access. The phone PIN is often more important than any individual password, because the phone is the 2FA device for everything else. Document PINs, passcodes, and backup keys for all devices.

4. Have the conversation. The hardest part isn't the technology — it's getting a parent to sit down and go through this. The key is framing it around safety and protection, not death. "Let's make sure I can help you if something goes wrong with your accounts" works far better than "What happens when you die?"

5. Record their wishes. Do they want their Facebook memorialized or deleted? Should their email be archived or purged? What about cloud storage? These decisions are much easier to make when the person is alive to express their preferences.

If you want a structured system for working through all five of these steps — including the conversation scripts, platform guides, and a complete digital asset inventory template — the Digital Legacy Kit packages everything into a printable guide you can complete in a single weekend.