What happens to your Apple, Google and Facebook account when you die

Left alone, most online accounts do nothing useful when their owner dies. They keep running — the photos stay, the subscriptions renew, the inbox fills — but nobody can legitimately get in. Handing someone your password ahead of time feels like the answer and tends to backfire: signing in as someone else generally breaks a provider's terms, and an unfamiliar login often locks the account rather than opening it.

The better route is the one the big platforms now build in on purpose. Apple, Google and Meta each have a formal way to nominate someone or wind an account down. All three share one catch: they only work if you set them up while you are alive and able. Here is what each actually does.

Apple lets you name one or more Legacy Contacts for your Apple Account. Setting it up generates an access key, which you share with that person and which Apple also stores against your account. Later, that contact can request access by supplying the access key together with a copy of your death certificate.

A couple of practical notes from Apple's own guidance: the feature needs a device on iOS 15.2, iPadOS 15.2, or macOS Monterey 12.1 or later to switch on, and a legacy contact generally has to be at least 13 to request access. Once approved, they can reach data such as photos, messages and files — not everything, but the things families most often need.

Google takes a different approach. Instead of a death-certificate process, it watches for inactivity. In Inactive Account Manager you pick how long the account should sit unused before Google acts — the window can be set anywhere from three to eighteen months — and you name the people to notify.

When the account crosses that line, Google messages the people you chose, shares the specific data you selected, and can offer them a download link. You can also tell Google to delete the account outright once the waiting period passes. It is quiet, automatic, and entirely under your control up front.

On Facebook you can name a legacy contact who is allowed to look after a memorialised version of your profile — pinning a message, updating the photo, responding to new friend requests. If you switched on the download setting beforehand, that person can also save an archive of your posts, photos and profile information.

The alternative is memorialisation, where the profile is preserved but frozen, or a request from a family member to remove it entirely. As with Apple and Google, the version that gives your family the most is the one you configure yourself, in advance.

These tools are worth setting up, but notice their limits. Each one covers a single company's account and nothing else. None of them hands over your passwords, and none reaches your bank, your investments, your domains or a crypto wallet. Turn on the ones that apply to you — and then keep one place that records what accounts exist, what you want done with each, and where the things they cannot reach are kept.