What happens to your digital life when you die

Question 1

What happens to my Google account when I die?

Accepted Answer

Nothing happens automatically unless you set something up in advance. Google's mechanism is Inactive Account Manager (IAM): you choose a period of inactivity, and if your account goes quiet for that long, Google notifies up to 10 people you designate and can share specific data categories with them, or simply delete the account. Per Google's own help page: "You can select up to 10 people to receive this data" and the plan triggers "if your Google Account has been inactive for a certain period of time" — there is no death check of any kind; it is a pure inactivity timer. If you never set up IAM, your family can instead use Google's separate deceased-user request process. It offers three distinct outcomes: obtaining data from the account, requesting funds (e.g. an AdSense balance), or closing the account. Google states plainly it "cannot provide passwords or other login details" — no request, however documented, gets your family your actual password. Google also warns about sequencing: "If you select to close the Google account, Google is unable to process any request to turn over the contents of the account at a later date" — so closing the account forecloses any later data…

Question 2

What happens to my Apple/iCloud account when I die?

Accepted Answer

Apple's Legacy Contact is the most thorough of the big-platform tools, with one major gap. Two things are required to use it, per Apple's support page: "Your Legacy Contact must have both the access key and your death certificate to request access after you pass away." What they get once approved is broad — photos, messages, notes, files, device backups. What they explicitly do not get: "your Legacy Contact can't access certain information. Inaccessible data includes movies, music, books, or subscriptions you purchased with your Apple Account, and data stored in your iCloud Keychain (payment information, passwords, and passkeys)." Passwords are the one category a family settling an estate needs most, and it's the one category walled off. If you never set up a Legacy Contact, Apple still has a fallback: "In the unfortunate event of a customer's death, Apple provides options for their loved ones to request access to or delete their Apple Account." This generally requires "a death certificate, and might also require a court order." In the U.S., a court order naming the requester as the account's rightful inheritor is sufficient on its own — no pre-set access key required for this…

Question 3

What happens to my Facebook and Instagram accounts when I die?

Accepted Answer

Facebook has a self-service Legacy Contact feature, limited to one person. Once your profile is memorialized, per Meta's own help pages, that legacy contact can: "Write a pinned post for your profile," "Update your profile picture and cover photo," "Request the removal of your account," and "Download a copy of what you've shared on Facebook." They explicitly cannot: "Log into your account. Read your messages. Remove any of your friends or make new friend requests." Memorialization itself (which can happen with or without a legacy contact, once Facebook is notified of the death) changes the account this way: "The word Remembering will be shown next to the person's name on their profile," "No one can log into a memorialized account," and "Content the person shared (ex: photos, posts) stays on Facebook and is visible to the audience it was shared with." A companion page adds: "In most cases, once an account is memorialized, content can't be removed from it." and So the honest summary for Facebook: a legacy contact can curate the memorial and even get the whole account deleted, but cannot read your messages or ever log in as you, and most content becomes frozen in place rather than…

Question 4

Can my spouse access my password manager if I die?

Accepted Answer

For most major password managers, yes — but only if you set it up in advance, and what your spouse gets is a raw list of credentials, not guidance. Across the vendors with a working "emergency access" feature (Bitwarden, LastPass, Proton Pass, NordPass, and — on the evidence we could find — Keeper), the pattern is consistent: your spouse only needs a free account with that same vendor. (Whether you, the vault owner, need a paid plan to grant the feature is verified only for Bitwarden, which requires Premium or a paid organisation; we did not confirm the grantor-side requirement vendor by vendor.) Bitwarden's documentation states it outright: "Anyone with a free or premium Bitwarden account on the same Bitwarden server can be designated as a trusted emergency contact." Two important exceptions cut the other way. 1Password has no emergency-access feature at all. Its "Emergency Kit" is a downloadable PDF meant for self-recovery, and 1Password's own guidance is direct: "It's important that you don't share your Emergency Kit with anyone." The only way a spouse gets in is if you printed that PDF and told them where it's kept — a paper backup, not a product feature. Dashlane's automated…

Question 5

How does Bitwarden emergency access actually work?

Accepted Answer

Bitwarden's Emergency Access is a request-and-wait system, not a death-verification system. Per Bitwarden's own documentation: - To grant emergency access, you (the owner) need a paid plan — Premium, or membership in a paid Families/Teams/Enterprise organization. - To receive it, your contact only needs a Bitwarden account, and it can be free: "Anyone with a free or premium Bitwarden account on the same Bitwarden server can be designated as a trusted emergency contact." - You set a wait time, with a documented minimum: "The minimum wait time is one day." - During that wait window, you can approve or deny the request manually at any point. - If you do nothing, access is granted automatically once the wait time elapses. What actually triggers release, in practice: your emergency contact logs into their own Bitwarden account, opens the Emergency Access section, and clicks "request access" against your account. That starts the clock. There is no death certificate, ID check, or third-party attestation anywhere in the flow — it is functionally identical whether you're deceased, in a coma, or just didn't see a notification email while on a two-week trip. What your contact receives once…

Question 6

Should I write my passwords down for my family?

Accepted Answer

There's a real tension here, and most security guidance doesn't resolve it honestly. On one side: NIST's password guidelines (SP 800-63B) explicitly list writing passwords down as a named attack surface, categorized under "Duplication" risks: "Passwords written on paper are disclosed." That's a real, documented threat model, not theoretical — a written password can be found, photographed, or stolen by anyone who has physical access to wherever it's kept. On the other side: the alternative most security tools point you toward — a password manager's own emergency-access or recovery mechanism — often turns out, on inspection, to also rely on a written/printed secret. 1Password's own recommended backstop is a printed document: its Emergency Kit PDF, which 1Password says explicitly not to share with anyone digitally, while separately being the tool most people are told to print and store physically for exactly this situation. In other words, even a security-first vendor's own answer to "what if I can't log in" ends in a piece of paper in a safe. So the honest, non-hand-wavy answer is: it's not "write it down" vs. "don't" — it's about where. A password (or a password manager's master…

Question 7

Is it legal for my family to log into my accounts after I die?

Accepted Answer

This is general information, not legal advice — talk to an estate attorney in your state for your specific situation. In the U.S., the relevant law is the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act (RUFADAA), a model law drafted by the Uniform Law Commission that individual states then enact (with minor variations) into their own statutes. According to Wikipedia's "Digital inheritance" article, which cites the Uniform Law Commission as its source for adoption data, "as of 2021, 47 states have enacted the RUFADAA" — we could not independently confirm that exact count on the ULC's own site, since uniformlaws.org is fully JavaScript-rendered and returned no retrievable article text to automated fetching in this research pass, so treat the "47 states" figure as secondary-sourced, not primary-confirmed. One state's actual enactment — Florida's Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act, Florida Statutes Chapter 740 — is directly fetchable and confirms the substance of RUFADAA: What RUFADAA actually creates is not a right to log in with someone's password. It creates a three-tier priority system for a formal disclosure request directed at the company (the "custodian"): (1) an…

Question 8

Does my will cover my digital assets?

Accepted Answer

This is general information, not legal advice. Under RUFADAA (see Q7), a will can direct what happens to your digital assets — but it is explicitly subordinate to any "online tool" you've configured with the company itself. Florida's enactment of the law states the hierarchy in one sentence: "If the online tool allows the user to modify or delete a direction at all times, a direction regarding disclosure using an online tool overrides a contrary direction by the user in a will, trust, power of attorney, or other record." , §740.003(1) Practically, that means: if you set Google's Inactive Account Manager to notify a specific person, that setting controls — even if your will says something different — because Google's tool lets you change your mind at any time and the law treats that as the more current expression of your wishes. Your will only becomes the controlling instrument for a given service if you never used that service's own online tool. There's a second limitation worth naming plainly: even when your will is the controlling document, it does not hand your executor your password. It authorizes them to make a formal request to the company, per §740.005–740.008 of the same…

Question 9

What happens to my crypto if I die?

Accepted Answer

This splits cleanly into two very different situations, and almost every general "digital legacy" answer glosses over the difference. If your crypto is self-custodied — a hardware wallet, a software wallet, or just a seed phrase written down — there is no company involved at all. Whoever has the seed phrase or private key controls the funds; there is no support line, no death certificate process, no "forgot password" flow, because there is no central party who could reset anything. Bitcoin.org's own educational page states this in the plainest possible terms: "Your bitcoins can be lost forever if you don't have a backup plan for your peers and family. If the location of your wallets or your passwords are not known by anyone when you are gone, there is no hope that your funds will ever be recovered." This is not a policy choice any company could change even if it wanted to — it's how public-key cryptography works. If nobody you trust knows where your seed phrase is, or how to use it, self-custodied crypto is permanently lost the moment you are, regardless of what your will says. If your crypto sits on a custodial exchange (Coinbase, Kraken, etc.) instead, the situation is…

Question 10

What happens to my subscriptions and recurring charges when I die?

Accepted Answer

Nothing stops automatically. A subscription is a standing instruction to a card or bank account, and it keeps charging until either (a) the subscription itself is canceled, or (b) the payment method behind it stops working (the card is closed, the bank account is frozen). Some routes for stopping platform-native subscriptions are documented directly by the platforms themselves. Closing an Apple Account (available through Apple's deceased-account request process, see Q2/Q14) would stop Apple-billed subscriptions — App Store, iCloud+, Apple Music, etc. — tied to that account. Google's deceased-user process similarly offers account closure as one of its three outcomes, which would stop Google-billed subscriptions (YouTube Premium, Google One, etc.). In both cases, closing the account is described as effectively final — Google specifically warns that closing forecloses any later request for the account's contents, so closing should generally be the last step, after data has been retrieved, not the first. Third-party subscriptions billed directly to a credit or debit card (streaming services, apps, memberships, anything not billed through Apple or Google's own store) are a different…

Question 11

How can my family find my accounts without exposing them while I am alive?

Accepted Answer

The tools that exist for this generally fall into two categories, and understanding the difference matters. Category one: the platform's own "legacy" tool, set up in advance, that only activates later. Google's Inactive Account Manager and Apple's Legacy Contact are both this shape — you configure them once, they sit dormant, and nothing is shared with anyone until the trigger condition (a set period of inactivity, or your death being reported with a certificate) is met. Crucially, under RUFADAA, using one of these tools is also the legally strongest option in the U.S.: an online tool's instructions override a contrary instruction in your will, precisely because you can change your mind on it at any time. Nothing is exposed while you're alive — that's the entire design of these tools. Category two: password-manager emergency access, set up the same way — dormant until your contact requests it and a wait period elapses. As covered in Q4/Q5, this doesn't expose anything while you're alive either; your emergency contact cannot see your vault until they actively request access and you fail to decline within the window you set. What neither category solves on its own is discovery —…

Question 12

What is a digital executor, and do I need one?

Accepted Answer

"Digital executor" is a term you'll see constantly in estate-planning blogs and marketing — but it is not a term used in the law itself. We checked the definitions section of Florida's enactment of RUFADAA (Florida Statutes §740.002) directly, and "digital executor" does not appear anywhere in it. The actual legal terms are: - "Fiduciary" — "an original, additional, or successor personal representative, guardian, agent, or trustee." This is usually the same person who is already your general executor, guardian, or agent under a power of attorney — the law does not create a separate, distinct role just for digital assets. - "Designated recipient" — "a person chosen by a user through an online tool to administer digital assets of the user." This is whoever you name in a platform's own legacy tool (Google's Inactive Account Manager contact, Apple's Legacy Contact, etc.). So "do I need a digital executor" is really two separate, more precise questions. First: does your general executor (the fiduciary named in your will) know your digital assets exist and have a way to act on them? If not, that's a gap regardless of what you call the role. Second: have you used each platform's own…

Question 13

What happens to my photos when I die?

Accepted Answer

It depends entirely on where the photos live, and the platforms treat this very differently from each other. Apple/iCloud Photos are explicitly not in the category Apple's Legacy Contact excludes. Recall from Q2: the exclusion list is "movies, music, books, or subscriptions you purchased with your Apple Account, and data stored in your iCloud Keychain (payment information, passwords, and passkeys)" — photos aren't on that list, so a Legacy Contact who has the access key and a death certificate can retrieve them. Google Photos, similarly, is one of the product categories Inactive Account Manager can share: Google's help page lists "Photos" among the exportable categories in its general data-export tool (Takeout), and IAM is built to hand a designated contact a download link for exactly this kind of data once triggered. You can also proactively export your own Google Photos library at any time via Google Takeout, while you're alive, as a backup — that's a self-service tool for the account owner, not a survivor-access mechanism, but it's worth knowing about for your own redundancy. Facebook/Instagram photos: per Q3, once memorialized, "Content the person shared (ex: photos, posts)…

Question 14

My parent died and I cannot get into their phone or accounts. What can I do?

Accepted Answer

Start by separating the device from the account — they require different processes, and conflating them wastes time. If the phone itself is passcode-locked, Apple is direct about this: "devices locked with a passcode are protected by passcode encryption, and Apple can't help remove the passcode lock without erasing the device." There is no support process, no death certificate, and no court order that gets you past a passcode without wiping the device and losing what's on it — this is a hard technical limit, not a policy Apple could waive. Before you consider erasing it, check the obvious: a written note, a password manager on another device, or a family member the deceased may have shared their passcode or Face ID with while alive. For the Apple Account (iCloud) itself — separate from the physical device — Apple's fallback process (if no Legacy Contact was set up in advance) requires "a death certificate, and might also require a court order." In the U.S., a court order naming you as the rightful inheritor of the account is generally sufficient. This can get you account-level access (photos, notes, files) even without ever touching the locked device, since iCloud data is…

Question 15

What happens to my password manager account if the company shuts down?

Accepted Answer

There is no universal guarantee here, and this is the one question in this set where we found the least direct, company-specific documentation. What we could confirm is the individual-level safeguard: most password managers let you export your own vault at any time, while the company is still operating, specifically so you are not dependent on the company's continued existence. Bitwarden's documentation, for example, describes exporting to .csv or .json formats and states: "No unencrypted data is transferred over the internet, because data is decrypted locally by the client before exporting." That's a safeguard you control now, in advance — not something that helps if you never used it and the company disappears later. For EU residents specifically, there is a regulatory backstop that doesn't exist in the same form in the U.S.: GDPR's right to data portability. The regulation's text states a data subject "shall have the right to receive the personal data concerning him or her... in a structured, commonly used and machine-readable format." That's a legal right to get your data out of a company while it's a going concern — it does not by itself specify what happens in an actual…

Question 16

What happens to my PayPal account when I die?

Accepted Answer

Nothing happens automatically — PayPal will only act on a deceased account at the request of the authorized executor or administrator of the estate, and only after reviewing specific documents. Per PayPal's own help article: "we're only able to take instructions from the authorized executor or administrator of the deceased estate to close a PayPal account previously held by a deceased person. If you wish to close the account of a loved one, please contact the relevant executor or administrator." The executor must submit, by email: a cover sheet identifying the account and requesting closure, a death certificate, a government-issued photo ID, "legal documentation or a copy of the will that identifies the executor of the estate" (or state-issued documentation if there's no will), and an IRS Form W-9 for the estate. Documents go to deceasedaccounts@paypal.com or a PayPal P.O. box in Omaha, Nebraska; mailed originals are destroyed after review and cannot be returned. Any remaining balance is disbursed one of two ways: PayPal issues a check "in the name of the deceased account holder" (ownership of the money doesn't change hands — it's still legally the deceased's funds going into the…

Question 17

What happens to my Venmo account when I die?

Accepted Answer

Like PayPal (its parent company), Venmo will not transfer ownership of an account to anyone — it will only close it. Venmo's own help article is direct: "We can't give access to or transfer ownership of a Venmo account to anyone other than the original account holder." At minimum, closing the account requires "a copy of the Death Certificate for the deceased individual." If there's money or crypto in the account, Venmo may also ask for a valid government-issued photo ID from the person contacting them, proof of address (so a check can be mailed if there's a balance), and legal documentation showing you're authorized to act for the estate — a probate court order appointing an executor, estate administrator paperwork, or Letters of Administration. If money is being disbursed, Venmo also wants an IRS Form W-9 for the estate. Requests go through Venmo's in-app chat support (Settings → Get Help → Chat With Us), not email — Venmo specifically asks that documents not be emailed directly, and instead be uploaded through a secure link an agent provides. If the deceased had a Venmo Credit Card (issued by Synchrony Bank, not Venmo itself), that card has to be closed separately, and…

Question 18

What happens to my LinkedIn profile when I die?

Accepted Answer

LinkedIn offers two different, mutually exclusive paths, and which one applies depends on who's asking and what they can prove. Per LinkedIn's own help page: "If you're authorized to act on behalf of a deceased member, and have the required information and documentation, you can request to close their account." Anyone without that authorization — a colleague, a friend, a distant relative — can instead "report a member as deceased and we will memorialize the profile." Closure deletes the account; LinkedIn states this "can take up to 30 days to completely delete the data from the system" once approved. To request it, LinkedIn requires acceptable legal documentation — "Letters of Administration issued by a court," "Letters of Testamentary issued by a court," "Letters of Representation issued by a court," or another court order naming the requestor as authorized representative — plus the member's full name, their profile URL, your relationship to them, their email, the date of death, and a link to an obituary or news article confirming it. Memorialization requires none of that: anyone can report the death, and LinkedIn adds a memorial marker without deleting anything or needing legal…

Question 19

What happens to my X (Twitter) account when I die?

Accepted Answer

X will deactivate a deceased user's account on request, but — like every platform in this set — will never hand over login access. X's own help page states it plainly: "In the event of the death of a X user, we can work with a person authorized to act on behalf of the estate, or with a verified immediate family member of the deceased to have an account deactivated." And separately, in its own sentence: "We are unable to provide account access to anyone regardless of their relationship to the deceased." The process starts with a request form; X then emails back asking for more detail, including "information about the deceased, a copy of your ID, and a copy of the deceased's death certificate." X says this step exists "to prevent false and/or unauthorized reports," and that the documentation "will remain confidential and will be removed once we've reviewed it." There's a second, less-discussed path on the same page for a living but incapacitated user: X will work with someone "authorized to act on the behalf of the user," but that request needs a Power of Attorney document specifically, plus a copy of the account holder's own ID — not just the requestor's. What we could not verify:…

Question 20

What happens to my Netflix account when I die?

Accepted Answer

Nothing changes on its own — billing keeps running until someone cancels it, and Netflix's process splits cleanly depending on whether you can log in. If you (or whoever's handling the account) have the login, Netflix's guidance is simple: sign in and "Click the Cancel Membership link on the Account page," the same as canceling for any other reason. Without login access, Netflix asks you to gather the email address or phone number tied to the account and the payment method currently used to pay for it, then contact Netflix support directly so an agent can process the cancellation. Netflix's help article does not describe a separate, formal "deceased member" documentation process (no mention of a death certificate requirement on this particular page) — the mechanism described is closer to a standard account-recovery-and-cancel flow than the death-certificate-and-court-order process PayPal, Venmo, and LinkedIn use. Netflix does not describe transferring the account, its viewing history, or "My List" to another person; the described outcome is cancellation, full stop. What we could not verify: whether Netflix has a separate, more formal bereavement process beyond what this specific…

Question 21

What happens to my Dropbox files when I die?

Accepted Answer

By default, nothing — the account and its files simply sit there, still billed if it's a paid plan, until someone acts. Dropbox's first suggestion, if you're looking for a deceased person's files, is low-tech: "look in the Dropbox folder on the person's computer if you can" — a locally-synced Dropbox folder is often the fastest way in, with no request process at all. For a formal request to Dropbox itself, the bar is high. Dropbox's help page requires proof of two separate things: "The person is in fact deceased," and "You have a legal right to access the person's files under all applicable laws." The specific document Dropbox asks for is "a valid court order establishing that it was the deceased person's intent that you have access to the files in their account after the person passed away, and that Dropbox is compelled by law to provide the deceased person's files to you." That's a notably narrower bar than a generic death certificate plus letters of administration — Dropbox is explicitly asking for a court order that speaks to intent and compulsion, not just proof that you're the legally appointed executor in general. Even then, Dropbox is not promising success: "we can't…

Question 22

Can I leave my Steam or Xbox game library to someone when I die?

Accepted Answer

No — on both platforms, what you have is a personal, non-transferable license, not property, and both companies' own agreements say so directly. Valve's Steam Subscriber Agreement states: "Subscriptions are not transferable, and even if your access to a Subscription for a particular game or application is terminated, the original activation key will not be able to be registered to any other account, even if the Subscription was obtained in a retail store." The same agreement lets you cancel your own account at any time, but explicitly warns that doing so "will not entitle you to any refund." Microsoft's rules for Xbox and other digital purchases are just as direct: "Except as may be permitted below, you may not transfer or resell any licenses to any Digital Goods," and if you sell a device that has digital content on it, "the purchaser will not acquire any right to use the Digital Goods." In practice, this means a game library — however large or expensive — isn't something a will can leave to anyone, because there's no ownership to transfer in the first place; the license was personal to the account, and ends with it (or simply sits inaccessible if no one ever closes the account).…

Question 23

What happens to a domain name I own when I die?

Accepted Answer

A registered domain doesn't expire or transfer on its own — it keeps renewing on the payment method on file until it lapses, and getting it moved to someone else requires going through the registrar's own estate-access process. GoDaddy's, as the largest registrar, is representative and fully documented: "To access a domain or an account after the death of the account holder, you must be the Estate Administrator of the deceased." GoDaddy requires four specific items submitted together, warning that "your request will not be considered" without all four: a completed "Regain Access To My Account" form naming the Estate Administrator as requestor; legal documentation naming that Estate Administrator; a copy of the death certificate; and government-issued photo ID for the requestor, which must be "a color copy, scan or digital picture containing the pictured person, name, signature and expiration date clearly identifiable." GoDaddy states it allows up to 72 hours just for the initial correspondence back. The practical risk isn't usually the transfer process itself — it's discovery and lapse. If nobody knows a domain exists, or the card on file gets closed when the estate's other…

Question 24

Is it a crime for my family to log into my accounts after I die?

Accepted Answer

This is general information, not legal advice — the answer genuinely depends on your state and the specifics, and you should not treat this as a green light or a red light without asking an attorney. The federal law in play is the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), 18 U.S.C. § 1030. Its core language criminalizes anyone who "intentionally accesses a computer without authorization or exceeds authorized access, and thereby obtains... information from any protected computer" — and courts have read "protected computer" broadly enough to cover essentially any computer connected to the internet, which includes the servers behind any online account. The open legal question is what "without authorization" means once the account holder has died and a platform's own terms of service (which every major platform bans password-sharing under) are the only thing defining "authorized." This is exactly the ambiguity Q7 in our first batch flagged and did not resolve: RUFADAA creates a lawful, formal request process aimed at the company, but simply typing in a known password is a different act entirely, and neither RUFADAA nor the CFAA's text directly says whether a grieving family member logging…

Question 25

Does listing my passwords in my will make them public record?

Accepted Answer

Largely yes for the will itself, but the answer has a real exception worth knowing, and it varies by state. This is general information, not legal advice. The general rule across U.S. states is that once a will is submitted to a probate court to open an estate, it becomes part of that court's case file, and probate case files are public court records — open to inspection by anyone, not just heirs or beneficiaries, typically for a modest copying fee at the courthouse or, increasingly, online. That means a password physically written into the body of a will is exposed to the same public-records access as every other sentence in it, permanently, the moment the will is filed. There is a real carve-out worth naming, and it shows how much this varies by state: Florida specifically amended its probate code so that a different document — the inventory of estate assets a personal representative files — is not public. Florida Statute §733.604 states: "Any inventory of an estate, whether initial, amended, or supplementary, filed with the clerk of the court in conjunction with the administration of an estate is confidential and exempt from" the state's general public-records law and…

Question 26

What happens to crypto I hold on Coinbase or Kraken when I die?

Accepted Answer

This directly answers what our first batch (Q9) explicitly flagged as unverified: at the time, both Coinbase's and Kraken's deceased-account pages returned bot-protection pages to every fetch attempt. This pass got through to Kraken's. Kraken runs a documented "Deceased Client Account Claims" process. Per Kraken's own support article: "While Kraken doesn't currently offer the option to add a beneficiary to an account, we do have a process to support families and legal representatives." The required documents are specific and stricter than most platforms in this set: "Death Certificate: Complete color image of the official document. Note that certificates issued by funeral homes are not accepted," plus "Legal Documentation" confirming appointment as legal representative (probate or letters of administration), a color photo ID of that representative, and a signed, dated letter from the representative confirming the death and their role. Kraken's Compliance team reviews the claim once submitted, and states "additional documents may be required." The funeral-home-certificate exclusion is a genuinely useful, specific detail: a family that gets a short-form or funeral-home-issued death…

Question 27

What happens to my airline miles and hotel points when I die?

Accepted Answer

The starting legal position at every major U.S. airline is the same, and it's blunter than most people expect: miles are not your property, and the airline's terms say so explicitly. Delta's Membership Guide and Program Rules state: "Miles are not the property of any Member," and, "except as specifically authorized in the Membership Guide and Program Rules or otherwise in writing by an officer of Delta, miles may not be sold, attached, seized, levied upon, pledged, or transferred under any circumstances, including, without limitation, by operation of law, upon death." The same document lists "A Member is deceased" as one of the conditions under which Delta will simply close the account, at which point "Medallion Status, benefits, and/or miles in the SkyMiles account will be forfeited." In practice, though, several airlines exercise discretion families don't expect from that blunt legal language. Based on American Airlines' own AAdvantage terms and conditions (confirmed via a search-engine-indexed excerpt of the terms rather than an independent direct fetch of aa.com in this pass — flagged as weaker sourcing below), AAdvantage miles likewise "do not constitute property of an…

Question 28

What happens to my bank account, and the 2FA code nobody can receive?

Accepted Answer

The 2FA problem resolves itself, but not the way people expect: an executor is never meant to log in as the deceased at all, so the two-factor code on a locked phone is a non-issue by design, not something that gets bypassed. Bank of America's own description of what it does on notification of a customer's death makes this explicit. Among the "protective actions" it lists: "Suspending Online and Mobile Banking user ID and Telephone Banking, including Bill Pay." The bank locks online access down, rather than leaving it open for a family member to attempt. Instead, the whole process moves to a documentation-based estate-servicing track: a case is opened, and the bank asks for a "Photocopy of the death certificate" (a certified copy in some cases), plus court-issued authority — "Letters of Testamentary, Letters of Administration or Certification of Appointment" — or, for smaller estates, a state-compliant small-estate affidavit. Other actions taken automatically on notice: debit/ATM cards are closed, authorized users removed, autopay and recurring transfers canceled, and most fees suspended. What happens to the money itself depends on how the account was titled — the CFPB is direct…

Question 29

What happens to my Amazon account — Kindle books, Prime, everything?

Accepted Answer

Amazon will close a deceased customer's account for an authorized representative of the estate, and its own help page is unusually direct about the consequence: closing it deletes everything, including purchased content. Per Amazon's Bereavement Support page: "we are only able to share account information or take actions in relation to an account when the request comes from the authorized person of the customer's estate." If the requestor doesn't have the account login, Amazon asks for "a copy of the death certificate, official certified documentation showing that you are the authorized person to access the account, a valid photographic ID," and the account's associated email address (or enough order/charge information to locate it if the email isn't known). (Amazon's live help pages actively blocked every direct automated fetch attempt in this research pass, including a browser-user-agent curl request and a rendering fetch tool; this is the most recent copy we could actually read.) The critical line, worth reading twice if you have a large Kindle library: "Once the account is closed all of the products and services accessed through that account will no longer be available across…

Question 30

What happens to my Spotify account when I die?

Accepted Answer

Unlike every other platform in this batch, we could not find a dedicated, official Spotify help article describing a deceased-account process at all — and we looked hard, including direct URL guesses, site-restricted searches, and checking Spotify's general support portal (support.spotify.com) for any death-specific policy page. None of it surfaced one. What we found instead were dozens of Spotify Community forum threads (user posts, not official policy) of family members asking how to cancel a deceased relative's Premium subscription, which is itself informative: it suggests Spotify handles these requests case-by-case through general customer support rather than via a published, documented process the way PayPal, Venmo, LinkedIn, and Amazon do. What we can say with confidence, because it follows from how any subscription works and not from a Spotify-specific policy: nothing stops automatically. A Spotify Premium subscription is a standing charge against a card, and it keeps billing until either the card stops working or someone actively cancels it — the same mechanic covered in our first batch's Q10. If you have login access, canceling through Account Settings works the same as…

Question 31

What happens to my Microsoft account — Outlook, OneDrive, Xbox — when I die?

Accepted Answer

FULLY SOURCED Nothing is deleted right away, and Microsoft is unusually candid that it does not want to be the one deciding who gets in. Its own support page opens: "For privacy and other legal reasons, we are generally unable to provide information to non-account holders." If whoever is handling the estate has the login, Microsoft's guidance is simple: sign in and close the account, the same as anyone would for any other reason — no notification to Microsoft required. If nobody has the login, Microsoft describes a slow, automatic wind-down instead of a request process: "Outlook.com and OneDrive accounts will be frozen after 1 year and any email messages and files stored on OneDrive will be deleted shortly after. Microsoft accounts expire after two (2) years of inactivity." So a family that does nothing at all eventually loses everything in the account — mail, files, photos — without ever having to ask. To get in sooner, or to get content out before that automatic deletion, the bar is the highest of any platform in our whole set so far: "Microsoft must first be formally served with a valid subpoena or court order to consider whether it is able to lawfully release a deceased or…

Question 32

What happens to my Discord account when I die?

Accepted Answer

FULLY SOURCED Discord's policy is unusually explicit for a platform this size, and its bottom line is blunt: deletion is on the table, access never is. Per Discord's own support article, "Deceased or Incapacitated Users": "Due to privacy and security reasons, we are unable to provide access, disclose personal information, make changes, or share data tied to an account." If the requestor has the login, they can delete the account themselves through Account Removal in Settings — Discord treats that exactly like any other self-service deletion. Without login access, but with access to the email on the account, a simple written statement is enough: "I confirm that I would like to delete the account associated with [emailaddress@email.com]." Requesting from a different email entirely requires real documentation: the deceased's email and username, a "Death certificate or coroner's report," proof of relationship ("Marriage license, birth certificate, last will and testament, estate letter, or power of attorney"), and the requestor's own valid photo ID or passport. Two details in this article are worth knowing before you need them. First, Discord states outright: "We do not currently have…

Question 33

What happens to my Etsy shop when I die?

Accepted Answer

FULLY SOURCED Etsy's own published policy is short, direct, and — like most of this set — draws a hard line between "we'll close it" and "we'll let you in." Etsy's House Rules state: "If you're an estate executor or next of kin, please know that Etsy takes account privacy very seriously, even after a member has passed away. While we're unable to offer access to a deceased member's account, we can work with you to close the account and, in some cases, provide certain content from the account. To ensure that you're authorized to act on behalf of the deceased, we'll ask you to provide certain documentation, such as a death certificate." Even reporting a death doesn't require being the executor: "If you know an Etsy member who has passed away, please reach out to our specially-trained team via our Help Center for assistance. Be sure to include the member's full name and email address." That's the low-bar path anyone — a friend, a customer, a fellow seller — can use just to flag the situation; actually closing the account or getting content out of it is reserved for whoever can document they're authorized to act for the estate. The practical stakes for an Etsy seller specifically are…

Question 34

What happens to my Substack when I die?

Accepted Answer

FULLY SOURCED Substack splits this into two separate, differently-worded policies depending on whether you're asking about someone's reading/subscriber account or their writer/publication — and the writer side has a notably narrow list of what's possible. For a reader account, Substack's help center states: "You can request the cancellation of their subscriptions and deletion of their account by visiting the support widget and asking for a human support specialist to assist you with your request," and adds a hard limit: "We can only delete accounts and cancel subscriptions of deceased account holders." Substack explicitly rules out several actions even with full documentation: "We cannot take any of the following actions on behalf of a deceased account holder: Change reader profile information / Allow account access / Change payment methods." For a writer's publication, the limits are stricter still, and one of them is the most consequential fact in this batch for anyone who writes for a living on Substack: "We cannot take any of the following actions on behalf of a deceased publisher: Grant account access to a non-account holder / Change banking information / Grant Stripe access…

Question 35

What happens to my eBay account when I die?

Accepted Answer

FULLY SOURCED eBay runs a dedicated, named process — a "Deceased member report form" — and its own help page is direct about it: "We understand that losing someone close to you can be very difficult. If a friend, family member or associate has passed away and had an active eBay account, you can use our Deceased member report form to get help." Anyone can file the initial report — not just the executor. It asks for "your full name, contact details, relationship to the deceased and the member's details, including their full name, birth date, death date, and username if known," plus "an official copy of the death certificate." That much gets the account flagged and current activity addressed. Two further, heavier actions require more: - Releasing a positive account balance requires "a court order admitting the deceased's will into probate and/or a copy of the court order appointing the executor of the deceased's estate," plus the requestor's own photo ID "with all information displayed." - Closing the account requires the same court-order documentation, plus photo ID — though here eBay explicitly allows redaction: "You may hide the ID number, title, place of birth, nationality, date…

Question 36

What happens to my Ring or smart-home account when I die?

Accepted Answer

PARTIAL — Ring sourced directly; Nest not checked Ring is the one platform in this whole project, so far, that documents a path requiring no death certificate and no court order at all — a genuinely different design than every other vendor in this set. Ring's own support article states: "To take over ownership of a Ring device from someone else, including someone who is deceased or medically incapacitated," the requestor opens the Ring app, taps "Set Up a Device," chooses "Request Ownership," and the request goes to the account currently registered to the device. That's the self-service path when you physically have the device and can't reach the previous owner. The request doesn't transfer instantly — it has to be approved (or lapse), the same way any device transfer works on Ring, and the article doesn't specify a distinct waiting period for the "can't contact the previous owner" scenario. For a more formal request — going through Ring customer support directly rather than the in-app flow — separate, third-party-reported guidance (not independently fetched by us in this pass) indicates Ring asks for "official certified documentation showing you are the authorized person to…

Question 37

What happens to my Keeper password vault when I die?

Accepted Answer

FULLY SOURCED Keeper documents its own emergency-access feature clearly, and it differs from Bitwarden (covered in Q4/Q5) in two concrete, useful ways. Per Keeper's own documentation: "Give trusted family and friends access to your Keeper Vault in the event of an emergency or loss of life. You can designate up to five emergency contacts and decide how much time should pass before their access is granted." Difference one — the feature itself is gated by account type, not by which side of the request you're on: "the Emergency Access feature is only available for consumer accounts." Difference two — Keeper states an actual maximum wait time, something we flagged as unconfirmed for Bitwarden: "The amount of time between your request to provide emergency access and access granted can be set up to three months per contact." That's a hard number Bitwarden's own documentation does not give. There's a real mechanical difference worth knowing before you rely on this: Keeper requires a pre-existing relationship before emergency access can even be set up. "In order for the recipient to accept the request, you must first establish a 'sharing' relationship if one hasn't already been established…

Question 38

What happens to a life insurance policy nobody knows about?

Accepted Answer

FULLY SOURCED This is a real, common problem with two separate official tools built specifically to solve it — one run by insurance regulators, one by state treasurers — and both are free. The first stop is the NAIC Life Insurance Policy Locator, run by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (the umbrella body for U.S. state insurance regulators). Per NAIC's own description: "Every year, millions of dollars in life insurance benefits remain unclaimed. Sometimes, beneficiaries can't find their deceased relative's policies or, in some cases, may not even know the policies exist. To help solve this issue, the NAIC created the Life Insurance Policy Locator, a free online tool that helps consumers find their deceased loved one's life insurance policies and annuity contracts." Using it means submitting the deceased's Social Security number (or ITIN), legal name, date of birth, date of death, veteran status, and your relationship to them; the request is checked against participating insurers, and the outcome is binary: "If a policy is found and you are the beneficiary, the life insurance or annuity company will contact you directly. If no policy is found or you are not the…

Question 39

What happens to my crypto on Coinbase when I die?

Accepted Answer

GAP STATED We tried to answer this directly a third time, across three separate research passes now (Q9, Q26, and this one), and Coinbase's deceased-account documentation remains genuinely unreachable by every method available to us. Direct curl with a browser user agent returned an HTTP 403 (bot-protection challenge) on help.coinbase.com. A rendering fetch tool returned the same result. A Wayback Machine lookup for the likely help-article URL returned no archived snapshot at all — {"archivedsnapshots": {}}, meaning even the Internet Archive has not captured a readable copy of whatever page currently exists at that address. We are publishing this as the answer rather than guessing, because it is itself useful information: if you hold crypto on Coinbase, you cannot assume it works like Kraken's (documented and quoted at Q26) or like a bank. Kraken specifically rejects funeral-home-issued death certificates and requires the official government-issued version; Coinbase's equivalent requirements — or whether it has a comparably formal process at all — are simply not something we, or apparently the Wayback Machine, have been able to independently confirm from Coinbase's own words…

Question 40

Does a power of attorney cover my online accounts?

Accepted Answer

FULLY SOURCED This is general information, not legal advice. Yes, but the details matter more than most people expect, and RUFADAA (the model law covered in Q7/Q8) draws a sharper line here than it does for a will. We checked Florida's enactment of the law directly. Florida's statute defines the relevant role first: "'Agent' means a person that is granted authority to act for a principal under a durable or nondurable power of attorney, whether denominated an agent, an attorney in fact, or otherwise." , §740.002(2) But the law splits what that agent can get into two very different tiers, and the split is exactly the one that matters for a family: - The content of your messages (the actual body of your emails, DMs, texts) requires your power of attorney to say so specifically. §740.008: "To the extent a power of attorney expressly grants an agent authority over the content of electronic communications sent or received by the principal... a custodian shall disclose to the agent the content." A generic, boilerplate power of attorney that just says "manage my affairs" does not clear this bar — most standard POA forms don't mention "content of electronic communications" at all, because…

Question 41

Do I have to give my passwords to my executor?

Accepted Answer

FULLY SOURCED This is general information, not legal advice. No — and this question is worth separating clearly from "does my executor have authority," because those are two different things this whole project keeps finding platforms conflate in casual conversation but never in their actual policy text. Your executor's authority comes from the law and from court-issued documents (letters of administration or testamentary), not from you having handed them a password in advance. Florida's RUFADAA enactment states this directly: a fiduciary acting within the proper scope of their role "is an authorized user of the property... for the purpose of applicable computer fraud and unauthorized computer access laws, including under chapter 815" — , §740.05(4) — meaning the law itself grants the fiduciary standing to act, separate from whether you ever shared a single credential with them while alive. That authority is what lets them make the formal disclosure requests to a company (a death certificate plus court letters) that we've documented throughout this whole project — Google, Apple, PayPal, Microsoft, Discord, and every other platform checked — as the actual mechanism that gets an…

Question 42

Can a bank freeze a joint account when one holder dies?

Accepted Answer

PARTIAL — a genuine, disclosed gap, not a formality This is general information, not legal advice. Two different things are true at once here, and conflating them is where the confusion usually comes from: who legally owns the money is a different question from whether the bank restricts access while it figures that out, and we could verify the first cleanly but not the second. On ownership, the CFPB (the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau) is direct: "Most joint bank or credit union accounts are held with 'rights of survivorship.' This means that when one account owner dies, the money passes to the surviving owner, or equally to the rest of the owners if there are multiple people on the account." The alternative titling, "tenants in common," works differently: "that person's share of the account passes to their heirs," via the will or state inheritance law rather than automatically to the co-owner. Under the far more common survivorship titling, the surviving joint owner legally owns the money the moment the other owner dies — there is no probate step required for that transfer. What we could not find a primary source specifically addressing is whether a bank's systems…

Question 43

Is my digital asset inventory a public record after probate?

Accepted Answer

FULLY SOURCED (Florida) / general rule not independently confirmed state-by-state This is general information, not legal advice. This is a different, more specific question than Q25 ("does listing passwords in my will make them public") — a will is one document; a personal representative's inventory of estate assets (the itemized list of what the estate owns, filed separately during administration) is a different one, and the two are treated very differently under at least one state's law. The general default in most U.S. probate systems is that documents filed with the court become part of that court's public case file — the same default that makes a filed will public once it's probated. Applied literally to an inventory, that would mean a list of "digital assets" filed as part of settling an estate (which could, depending on how carefully it was drafted, include account names or even references to where credentials are stored) becomes just as publicly inspectable as the will itself. Florida is a documented, concrete exception to that default, which is exactly why it's useful to know the default isn't universal. Florida Statute §733.604 states plainly: "Any inventory of an…

Question 44

What happens to my Reddit account when I die?

Accepted Answer

GAP STATED Unlike every platform in questions 31–39 above, we could not locate an official, dedicated Reddit help article describing a deceased-user process at all, despite trying several different approaches: direct fetches of Reddit's help-center search endpoints (blocked with an HTTP 403 bot-protection response), Reddit's internal Zendesk-style search API (returned an empty result set for "deceased"), and general web search for Reddit's own help domain specifically. None surfaced a Reddit-authored policy page. This mirrors what we found for Spotify (Q30): the absence itself is the finding, not a failed fetch we're papering over. What that likely means in practice, based on how every other undocumented-policy platform in this set behaves, is that Reddit almost certainly handles these requests case-by-case through general customer support rather than via a published, self-service process the way PayPal, Discord, or eBay do — but we want to be explicit that this is an inference from the absence of a documented policy, not something Reddit has told us directly. What we can say with confidence, because it follows from how any account works rather than from a Reddit-specific policy:…

Question 45

What happens to my Patreon page when I die?

Accepted Answer

GAP STATED As with Reddit above, we actively searched for Patreon's own dedicated deceased-account policy and did not find one. Patreon's general help center is reachable, and its Zendesk-style internal search endpoint responded, but returned no matching article for "deceased," and no independent search surfaced a Patreon-authored support article on the topic — only third-party estate-planning blog posts describing how survivors have handled the situation in practice, which are not primary sources and are not quoted here. This matters more for Patreon specifically than it would for a typical social account, because a Patreon page is frequently a real income stream — a creator's patrons are actively billed on a recurring basis, and (per Q10, on subscriptions generally) that billing does not stop on its own. Without a documented Patreon-specific process, the honest guidance is the general one: if you have login access to a deceased creator's Patreon account, you can pause or cancel it directly through account settings the same as any other subscription-style service; if you don't, contacting Patreon support directly — and being prepared to prove the death and your relationship or…

Question 46

Did Louisiana repeal its digital assets law? (RUFADAA, repealed 2024)

Accepted Answer

Yes. Louisiana's fiduciary-access-to-digital-assets chapter was repealed effective 1 July 2024, and most published fifty-state tables have not caught up. This is general information about what a statute says. It is not legal advice, and Louisiana is a civil-law jurisdiction whose succession law does not map neatly onto the other forty-nine states. Talk to a Louisiana attorney about an actual estate. What the law used to be In 2016 Louisiana enacted House Bill 1118, which — in the enrolled bill's own words — was an act "To enact Chapter 44 of Title 51 of the Louisiana Revised Statutes of 1950, to be comprised of R.S. 51:2701 through 2720, relative to fiduciaries and the digital property of decedents and other certain persons … to specify for a user's direction of disclosure to override certain contrary provisions; to provide for the rights of certain persons with respect to terms-of-service agreements". That is the shape of the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act (RUFADAA), the model law we describe in Q7 and Q8, and it is the citation nearly every fifty-state comparison on the web still gives for Louisiana. Source, fetched by us on 8 August 2026: the enrolled…

#	Question	Status	Notes
16	PayPal account	VERIFIED	Primary source fetched and quoted directly.
17	Venmo account	VERIFIED	Primary source fetched and quoted directly.
18	LinkedIn profile	VERIFIED	Primary source fetched and quoted directly.
19	X (Twitter) account	VERIFIED	Same-day Wayback snapshot; text extracted directly, not summarised.
20	Netflix account	PARTIAL	Primary source fetched, but the page describes a lighter process than other platforms and may not be the complete policy.
21	Dropbox files	VERIFIED	Primary source fetched and quoted directly.
22	Steam / Xbox game library	VERIFIED	Two independent primary sources (Valve, Microsoft) fetched and quoted directly.
23	Domain name (GoDaddy)	VERIFIED	Primary source fetched and quoted directly. Other registrars not checked.
24	CFAA / is it a crime	VERIFIED (statute) / open legal question	Statute fetched and quoted; the application to this scenario is honestly unresolved and the answer says so.
25	Will = public record	VERIFIED (Florida)	Florida statute fetched directly; the general rule is standard consensus, not fetched for all states.
26	Crypto exchange (Kraken/Coinbase)	VERIFIED (Kraken only)	Kraken fetched and quoted. Coinbase: UNVERIFIED, blocked.
27	Airline miles	PARTIAL	Delta VERIFIED by direct fetch. American Airlines from a search-engine excerpt only — weaker, flagged in the answer.
28	Bank account + 2FA	VERIFIED	Bank of America and CFPB fetched and quoted. Only one bank checked.
29	Amazon account	PARTIAL	Quoted directly but only from a January 2025 snapshot; currency not confirmed.
30	Spotify account	UNVERIFIED	No official policy page found despite active searching; the absence is the finding.
31	Microsoft account	VERIFIED	Primary source fetched and quoted; four separate quotes re-confirmed against the live page on 8 August 2026.
32	Discord account	VERIFIED (archived)	Live help centre blocked; quoted from a Wayback snapshot roughly eight months old.
33	Etsy shop	VERIFIED (archived)	Live legal pages blocked; quoted from a Wayback snapshot.
34	Substack	VERIFIED (archived)	Both articles blocked live; quoted from Wayback snapshots, re-confirmed independently against the archived page on 8 August 2026.
35	eBay account	VERIFIED	Primary source fetched and quoted directly.
36	Ring / smart-home	PARTIAL	Ring's device-transfer article fetched and quoted directly. The formal deceased-owner article could not be located; Nest not checked at all.
37	Keeper vault	VERIFIED	Keeper's own documentation fetched and quoted; three separate quotes re-confirmed against the live page on 8 August 2026.
38	Unclaimed life insurance	VERIFIED	NAIC and NAUPA fetched and quoted directly. The life-insurance-specific dormancy period is not confirmed.
39	Coinbase crypto	UNVERIFIED	Blocked on every method across three independent research passes.
40	Power of attorney	VERIFIED (Florida)	Florida's RUFADAA statute fetched and quoted; other states not surveyed.
41	Passwords to executor	VERIFIED (synthesis)	One freshly-fetched Florida statute section plus quotes already independently sourced elsewhere in this library.
42	Joint account freeze	PARTIAL	CFPB ownership rule verified. No primary source found on joint-account-specific access restriction.
43	Inventory as public record	VERIFIED (Florida)	Florida statute fetched and quoted; the other forty-nine states not surveyed.
44	Reddit account	UNVERIFIED	No official policy page found despite active searching; the absence is the finding.
45	Patreon page	UNVERIFIED	No official policy page found despite active searching; the absence is the finding.
46	Louisiana repeal	VERIFIED (repeal) / replacement UNCONFIRMED	Both the 2016 enrolled bill creating R.S. 51:2701–2720 and the current statute text showing §2701 repealed were fetched from the Louisiana Legislature's own site and independently re-fetched on 8 August 2026. The replacement citation, the text of Acts 2024 No. 312, and whether all twenty sections fell are explicitly not confirmed, and the answer says so.

What happens to your digital life when you die — 46 questions, answered from primary sources

The forty-six questions

How this was checked, and what that is worth

Questions 1–15, checked 2–3 August 2026

Questions 16–30, checked 6–7 August 2026

Questions 31–46, checked 7–8 August 2026

Verification status

Could not verify

Who wrote this, and why you should check it