When someone dies in Britain, their house, savings and record collection pass under the will or the intestacy rules. Their thirty years of emails, twenty thousand photographs in a cloud library and the loyalty balances, domain names and cryptocurrency scattered across a dozen logins often do not, because in law most of those accounts were never theirs to leave. The terms of service for iCloud, Google, Microsoft and nearly every major platform grant a personal, non-transferable licence that ends at death. The photographs are yours; the account that holds them is not, and the distinction only becomes visible when a grieving family asks for access and is refused.
The legal patchwork makes this worse. UK data protection law protects only living people, so a platform faces no GDPR barrier to releasing a dead user's data, yet most refuse anyway, citing their contracts and the privacy of correspondents who are still alive. Executors can compel banks to disclose balances because money is property, but there is no equivalent general right to compel Google to open an inbox. A grant of probate, the document that unlocks bank accounts over each institution's threshold (as low as £5,000 at NS&I, up to £50,000 at some high-street banks), carries little weight with a California platform applying its own policy. Families have gone to court in the United States and Germany to win access to a dead child's messages; in England the question has never been cleanly decided, and the Law Commission's recent work on digital property has concentrated on crypto-assets rather than on emails and photo libraries.
There is also a trap for the well-meaning. Logging into a dead relative's account with a password found in a notebook is, on a strict reading, unauthorised access under the Computer Misuse Act 1990, because the authorisation died with the account holder. Prosecutions of grieving spouses are not a realistic prospect, but banks and platforms can and do freeze accounts when they detect post-death activity, which can turn a simple estate into a slow one.
What the platforms actually offer
The workable answer is the tools the platforms built, and they differ sharply. Apple's Legacy Contact, added in 2021, lets you nominate up to five people who each receive an access key; after your death they present the key and a death certificate, and Apple opens most iCloud data, though not purchased films or music, for three years before deletion. Without a nominated contact, Apple generally requires a court order. Google's Inactive Account Manager works on a timer instead: you choose a trigger period between three and eighteen months of inactivity, pick up to ten people to be notified, and decide whether they may download your data or whether the account simply deletes itself. Facebook offers memorialisation, freezing the profile with "Remembering" above the name, and an optional legacy contact who can manage tributes and change the cover photo but can never read private messages. Microsoft, by contrast, offers next of kin almost nothing without a court order, and many smaller services offer no scheme at all: the account sits until the subscription lapses or an inactivity policy deletes it.
Cryptocurrency is the extreme case. Coins held in self-custody are controlled by whoever holds the private keys, and there is no customer-service department to petition. Estates have lost holdings permanently because keys died with their owner; the collapse of the Canadian exchange QuadrigaCX in 2019, whose founder died reportedly holding sole access to about C$190 million of customer funds, is the cautionary tale the industry still cites.
Setting it up while you can
The practical steps take an evening. Nominate an Apple legacy contact and configure Google's inactive-account timer. Decide, and record, whether you want social profiles memorialised or deleted. Put nothing secret in the will itself, because a will admitted to probate becomes a public document anyone can order for £1.50; instead, keep an inventory of accounts and assets, without passwords, stored alongside the will, and use a password manager whose emergency-access feature releases credentials to a named person after a waiting period. Executors should register the death with the Death Notification Service, which alerts most UK banks in one step, and approach platforms through their bereavement channels rather than borrowed passwords. Solicitors and the professional body STEP now routinely ask clients about digital assets when drafting wills, and the reason is simple arithmetic: an average person's most complete archive of their own life is now behind logins, and the default, absent planning, is that much of it quietly vanishes.
