Digital Estate Planning: What Happens to Your Online Accounts After You Die
As people accumulate ever more digital assets — from cloud storage to cryptocurrency — few plan what should happen to them after death. US legal experts explain how state law now governs access to a deceased person's online accounts.
When someone dies, their family is often left wondering who should take over their email, cloud storage, or social media accounts. If the person never documented their digital assets or their wishes, it can become nearly impossible for survivors to even know what exists, let alone manage it.
The issue isn't just sentimental — digital assets can carry real monetary value. If a social media account generates dividends, beneficiaries need to know how to collect future proceeds and whether keeping the account active makes sense. Cryptocurrency raises even trickier questions: if it's held in a private wallet and no one has the key, the funds are lost permanently. But if the crypto is held by a third party, such as an exchange or payment platform, the situation differs, since bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are legally classified as digital assets that must be accounted for in estate planning.
How the Law Handles It
In the US, digital inheritance falls under state law, just like traditional probate matters. The Uniform Law Commission developed a model law on fiduciary access to digital assets, which has now been adopted by 48 states, Washington, DC, and the US Virgin Islands. According to Benjamin Orzeske, the commission's chief counsel, the law rests on the idea that digital property differs fundamentally from physical property — for instance, forwarded postal mail after death gives a trusted person only new incoming items, while email access could expose an entire searchable history of communication the deceased may have wanted kept private.
The central tension comes from a federal law that bars companies from releasing user data without consent. The state-level law tries to balance survivors' rights against the deceased's privacy. In practice, this means a designated trusted person can close accounts, but can only access their actual contents — emails, messages, photos, and other files — if the deceased explicitly granted that authority beforehand.
