What Happens to Your Online Accounts When You Die?

Most of us now hold a substantial part of our lives online — photographs, correspondence, financial records, creative work, and years of accumulated conversation. When someone dies, all of it continues to exist on servers owned by companies with their own policies, in a legal area that hasn’t fully caught up.

For executors, digital accounts can be one of the most frustrating parts of estate administration. For anyone planning ahead, they’re one of the easiest things to make dramatically simpler.

The Core Problem

When you sign up for an online service, you agree to terms that typically grant you a licence to use the account — not ownership of it. The account itself belongs to the provider.

That creates real difficulty after death:

Access can be a criminal matter. Logging into someone else’s account without authorisation can breach the Criminal Code and federal privacy legislation — even if you’re the executor and even if you have the password.

Terms of service often prohibit transfer. Many explicitly say accounts are non-transferable and terminate on death.

Providers are outside Canada. Most major platforms are US-based and apply their own policies regardless of what a BC court says.

The law is unsettled. BC has not adopted comprehensive fiduciary access legislation of the kind some other jurisdictions have. Executors operate in a grey area.

The practical result: even a properly appointed executor with a grant of probate may find a provider unwilling to give access.

What the Major Platforms Do

Google offers Inactive Account Manager, the best tool available. You nominate up to ten trusted contacts and specify what they receive if the account is inactive for a period you set. Configured in advance, it works cleanly. Without it, Google may consider requests from a legal representative but generally won’t grant full access.

Apple offers Legacy Contact. You designate someone during your lifetime and Apple provides them with an access key. Combined with a death certificate, the contact can access the account’s data. Without a Legacy Contact, Apple typically requires a court order — and Apple ecosystems often hold the family photo library, which makes this consequential.

Meta (Facebook and Instagram) allows accounts to be memorialised or deleted. You can name a Legacy Contact in advance who can manage a memorialised profile — pin a post, respond to friend requests, update the profile picture — but cannot read messages. Family can request memorialisation or deletion with proof of death.

Microsoft has no legacy contact system. Its policy is generally to close accounts on request with appropriate documentation, and it does not typically provide access to contents.

X (Twitter), LinkedIn, and most others will deactivate or remove accounts on request with proof of death, but rarely provide access to the contents.

Financial platforms — PayPal, Wise, brokerages — hold actual assets and generally require probate documentation. These follow financial rather than social media rules.

What Executors Should Actually Do

Start with a written inventory. Work through the deceased’s email, browser bookmarks, phone apps, and bank statements to identify what accounts exist. Recurring charges are particularly revealing — they surface subscriptions nobody knew about.

Prioritise by what matters. Not every account needs the same effort:

Financial accounts holding real assets come first — these are estate property.

Accounts with recurring charges come next, because they keep billing. Cancel them promptly.

Accounts with sentimental content — photos, correspondence, creative work — deserve real effort. This is usually what families care about most.

Everything else can be closed or simply left to lapse.

Look for a Legacy Contact or Inactive Account Manager. Check whether the deceased configured one. If so, the process is straightforward.

Approach providers formally. Most major platforms have an online form for reporting a death. You’ll typically need a death certificate and proof of your authority. Be prepared for it to take time.

Don’t just log in, even if you can. It’s understandable and extremely common — but it may breach terms of service and potentially the law, and it can create problems if the estate is ever contested. Where the content genuinely matters, get advice.

Download and preserve what you legitimately can. Where you have proper access, export photos, documents, and correspondence promptly. Accounts can be closed by providers for inactivity.

Close accounts once you’re done. Dormant accounts are an identity theft risk — see our guide to protecting a loved one’s identity after death.

What About Password Managers?

A password manager can be the key to the entire digital estate — or a locked vault nobody can open.

Most reputable password managers (1Password, Bitwarden, LastPass) offer emergency access or legacy access features that let you designate someone who can request access after a waiting period. Set this up.

Without it, the master password is usually unrecoverable by design. That’s excellent security and a genuine problem for estates.

Planning Ahead: What to Actually Do

If you’re reading this while thinking about your own affairs, here’s what makes the real difference.

Configure the built-in tools. Google’s Inactive Account Manager, Apple’s Legacy Contact, and Meta’s Legacy Contact take fifteen minutes combined and solve most of the problem. This is the highest-value action available.

Set up emergency access in your password manager.

Make an inventory. List the accounts that matter — financial platforms, email, cloud storage, photo libraries, subscriptions, domains, loyalty points, anything holding value or meaning. Note what you’d want done with each.

Store it securely and tell someone. A sealed document with your will, or a note in your password manager telling your executor where to look. Don’t put passwords in your will itself — a will can become a public document through probate.

Address it in your will. You can authorise your executor to deal with your digital assets and express your wishes about what should be preserved, memorialised, or deleted. This doesn’t override a provider’s terms, but it establishes your intent and gives your executor a clearer position.

Talk to your executor. Make sure they know digital assets exist and where to find your instructions.

Review annually. Accounts and platforms change.

Cryptocurrency Is a Special Case

Crypto and other self-custodied digital assets present a distinct and much more severe problem: if the private keys are lost, the asset is permanently gone, with no provider to appeal to.

We cover this separately in our guide to cryptocurrency and digital assets in an estate.

Where We Fit

At Alternatives Funeral & Cremation Services, we provide the certified death certificates that every platform, provider, and financial institution will require — and we can supply the statements of death that some services accept.

If you’re preplanning with us, we’d also encourage you to include your digital wishes alongside your funeral wishes. It’s a small addition to the conversation that can save your family real difficulty.

Learn more at myalternatives.ca

This article provides general information about digital assets in Canada. Platform policies and the law in this area change frequently. For advice about a specific estate, consult a qualified estate lawyer.