The Care CompassDigital Legacy: Passwords, Photos and Accounts After Death or Loss of Capacity
Wills and LPAs were designed for a world of paper, property, and bank statements that arrive in the post. They don't naturally cover the parts of someone's life that only exist on a phone or in the cloud, and that's an increasingly large part of everyone's life.
If nobody can get into a phone, they often can't get into anything else either, banking apps, email, photos, everything. This guide covers what to plan for now, before it becomes a problem.
Why this matters more than people think
A locked phone is usually the first barrier, and often the biggest one, since most password resets for other accounts go through email, and email is usually accessed through the phone. Without a way in, family can be locked out of banking, photos, and communication all at once, even when they have every legal right to be there.
Setting up access in advance
Apple (iPhone/iPad): Go to Settings → [your name] → Sign-In & Security → Legacy Contact. This generates an access key that must be shared with your chosen contact and kept somewhere findable, ideally alongside a will or other important documents, since it can't be recovered later if lost.
Google (Gmail, Photos, Drive): Google's Inactive Account Manager lets you set a period of inactivity, up to 18 months, after which a chosen contact is notified and given access, or the account is deleted, whichever you choose in advance.
Facebook: Go to Settings & Privacy → Settings → Accounts Centre → Personal details → Account ownership and control → Memorialisation. You can appoint a Legacy Contact to manage a memorialised version of the account, or choose to have the account deleted entirely after death.
Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter/X don't currently offer any advance planning tools. After a death, family can request memorialisation or account closure, but this requires submitting a death certificate and supporting documents at the time, there's no way to set it up beforehand.
WhatsApp has no legacy feature at all. If family has the phone itself, the account can be deleted directly through the app. Without the phone, a request can be submitted with a death certificate, though this is often slower than simply waiting, since WhatsApp automatically deletes accounts after 120 days of inactivity. End-to-end encryption also means WhatsApp cannot release chat history under any circumstances, to anyone.
What to actually write down now
You don't need to hand over your actual passwords to anyone in advance, that carries its own risks. What genuinely helps is a written list, kept somewhere safe, of:
What exists. Which bank accounts, subscriptions, and online-only services you use. Online accounts with no paper statement are easy to forget entirely, and families sometimes only discover a forgotten subscription months later, still quietly taking payment.
Where the master key is. If you use a password manager, family only needs to know that it exists and how to access the one master password, not every individual login.
Who the Legacy Contacts are. A simple note of which accounts have a Legacy Contact set up, and who it is, saves a lot of confusion later.
Photos deserve special mention
Cloud photo libraries are often the only copy of years, sometimes decades, of family photos. Unlike a physical photo album, they're genuinely inaccessible without the right login or a pre-arranged Legacy Contact. If nothing else from this guide gets actioned, setting up access to a cloud photo library is worth doing on its own.
A word from The Care Compass
This is a genuinely modern gap, most of the traditional planning advice out there was written before this was really a problem. Sorting it now, while it's a calm five-minute task on a phone, is far easier than trying to solve it later, at the worst possible time.
This article is general guidance based on publicly available platform information at time of writing. Provider processes can change, always check the current steps on the platform itself.
Common Questions
What is a digital legacy?
Everything of someone's that exists online or on a device rather than on paper, passwords, phones, online banking, subscriptions, cloud photos, email, and social media. Traditional wills and LPAs weren't written with this in mind, so it needs planning for separately.
What happens to a Facebook account when someone dies?
If a Legacy Contact was set up in advance, that person can manage a memorialised version of the account. Without one, Facebook memorialises the account by default once notified of the death, but with much more limited options, and nobody can log in as the deceased.
Can family access someone's phone after they die?
Only if they know the passcode, or if a Legacy Contact was set up in advance through the phone's own settings. Apple generates an access key that must be shared and stored somewhere findable, like alongside a will. Without this, getting into a locked phone after death is difficult even for close family.
What about online banking and subscriptions?
Online-only accounts and recurring subscriptions are easy to miss entirely if nobody knows they exist, since there's no paper statement to find. A simple written list of what accounts and subscriptions exist, kept somewhere safe, is often more useful in practice than trying to give someone your actual passwords.
Does WhatsApp have a legacy contact option?
No. WhatsApp has no legacy or memorialisation feature. If family has the phone itself, the account can be deleted through the app. Without the phone, a request can be submitted to WhatsApp with a death certificate, though this is often slower than simply waiting, since inactive accounts are automatically deleted after 120 days.
You don’t have to navigate it alone.
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