Digital accounts after a death: what to plan for

Handing someone your credentials feels like solving this, and it is the one approach that reliably backfires. Most providers' terms do not permit signing in as somebody else, and accounts that detect an unfamiliar sign-in commonly lock rather than open.

The people who inherit the problem then face a harder version of it: a locked account, no legitimate route, and no record of what was in there.

Several large providers have built formal mechanisms for this — inactive-account handovers, legacy contacts, memorialisation of profiles, and processes for a relative to request closure or data. They differ in name, scope and eligibility, and they change.

Set up the ones that apply to your important accounts, and note in your own records that you have done so. The mechanism only works if the person you nominated knows they were nominated.

Photos, messages and writing are the part families grieve over losing. Domains, hosting, cloud storage and payment processors are the part that quietly breaks things if left unattended — a lapsed domain can take down a business's email.

Both matter, and they need different treatment. Copies of what is sentimental, and instructions plus access for what is operational.

An inventory of accounts is useful even without credentials. Knowing there is a cloud archive of twenty years of photographs tells a family what to pursue; nobody can pursue an account they do not know about.

Include the small recurring ones. Subscriptions are easy to forget and keep charging a card long after they should have stopped.

Deleted, kept, memorialised, passed to a specific person — say which, per account or per category. Without instructions, whoever is left makes an irreversible decision on your behalf while grieving, and they will worry afterwards that they chose wrong.