How companies handle your accounts after death – and what you can do to prepare

It’s something you never think about, and maybe you don’t even want to. The other day I was poking around in my iCloud settings and I came across an option to add a legacy contact. By adding a legacy contact you can choose someone you trust to get an access key, which together with your death certificate will give them access to your digital legacy. This can include photos, videos, notes, documents and personal information you’ve stored in iCloud.

This never crossed my mind but I thought it’s nice that Apple is giving you the option for this. It also got me thinking about how much of our lives are stored in a digital format. All your social media accounts, emails, blogs, YouTube, and other user accounts contain so much information. Do you want it to stay online after you pass away? Do you want your loved ones to have access to the accounts? Or do you just want it all deleted? And is that all even possible once you’re not here to control the accounts anymore.

So Apple gives the user an option to add a legacy contact. What about the other big companies I have accounts with?

Instagram account after death

After you pass away, your friends or family can request to get your Instagram account memorialized. Once memorialized, the word “Remembering” will be shown next to your name, no one can log in to your account or change any of your existing posts and your account won’t appear in certain places like the explore page. Your profile picture, privacy settings, followers, people you follow and any comments you’ve shared on your own profile also cannot be changed.

To memorialize an account you’ll have to contact Instagram and provide some form of proof of death, like a link to an obituary. You can read more about memorialized Instagram accounts on Instagram’s support page.

If your family does not want your account to be memorialized they have two options. Either do nothing and leave the account online or request it to be removed. Immediate family members can request a deceased person’s account to be deleted, but Instagram requires quite a bit of proof to do so. They’ll verify the request is actually coming from an immediate family member and require documents such as the deceased person’s birth certificate, death certificate or proof of authority under local law stating that you’re a lawful representative of the deceased person.

Facebook account after death

Facebook’s approach to user accounts after death is very similar to Instagram. Your family can choose to do nothing and leave the account as is, request it to be removed, or request it to be memorialized.

Memorialized Facebook accounts will have the word “Remembering” next to the user’s name and the account won’t show up in certain places on Facebook, for example on those “people you may know” lists and birthday reminders. It would be a bit awkward to get a birthday reminder for a person who’s passed away.

If the user’s privacy settings allow, friend and family can share memories on the memorialized account’s timeline. And lastly, no one can log in to a memorialized account.

One key difference between Facebook and Instagram is that Facebook allows you to add a legacy contact. If you add a legacy contact on Facebook they can write a pinned post on 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 if your privacy settings allow it. They cannot log into your account, read your messages or remove/add friends.

Google and YouTube accounts after death

Google and YouTube accounts do not give you the option of adding a legacy contact. According to Google they “work with immediate family members and representatives to close the account of a deceased person when appropriate”. What does appropriate mean, they don’t exactly tell you that. By default Google starts deleting inactive user accounts when you haven’t logged in for more than two years, so the most likely scenario here is that you’ll die, become inactive and about two years later Google will automatically delete your account. That is, if your family didn’t already request that earlier.

Despite not having an option for legacy contacts Google does offer something called “Inactive Account Manager”. This is an option to add a contact to your account who will automatically get notified if you’ve been inactive and haven’t logged in for a while. By default the inactive account manager will get an automated email from Google telling them that you’ve asked Google to notify this person that you’ve stopped using your account. Which, as a statement alone feels pretty useless. You can also choose to give your inactive account manager access to a variety of account data, including mail, youtube, blogger and google drive access.

TikTok account after death

What about TikTok, what happens to your TikTok account after death? I did a lot of digging and found absolutely nothing. There’s no support articles on how they handle accounts after death. No legacy contacts, no information for the families of deceased… nothing.

So yeah, TikTok doesn’t care.

Microsoft account after death

Microsoft has a typical Microsoft approach to this. Their official support article says that if the family of the deceased has login credentials, they can log in and manually delete the account. If they don’t have login credentials they’re out of luck and have to wait two years for the account to get closed due to inactivity.

If you have active subscriptions the only way your family can stop those is to close your bank accounts. In most cases that would probably happen anyway but this still feels like a bad way to handle the accounts of people who aren’t here anymore. The family of the deceased already has a lot on their plate, having Microsoft actively charging for services that aren’t being used just feels like a slap in the face.

How to prepare your accounts before you die

What do we learn from all of the above? Different companies have different policies and some of them will give you an option to prepare now and add a legacy contact while you’re still alive. Some won’t help you at all and most of them will not give any login information to anyone after you die, not even your immediate family.

The best thing to do would be to add a legacy contact whenever possible and potentially save your login information somewhere if you want your family to have access to your accounts. If you don’t want anyone to access anything, your data is usually safe. No one can log into your accounts without a password and even if your family reaches out to tech support, the most they’ll do is usually close your account.