Digital Legacy Contacts: What Happens to Your Accounts When You Die

Every major platform now has some version of this feature, but they are not the same feature wearing different names — one requires a death certificate, one requires nothing but time passing, and one is the difference between a 72-hour wait and your family needing a court order. Setting the right one up today is a ten-minute task per platform. Finding out which one you needed after the fact is not.

The tradeoff each platform made, in one line

Apple Legacy Contact: strongest access, but your contact needs a death certificate to use it.
Google Inactive Account Manager: no death certificate at all — it's triggered by time, not proof of death, so you choose the waiting period yourself.
Microsoft OneDrive Digital Legacy: covers OneDrive only, but with no death certificate and just a 72-hour wait — skip it, and the fallback for the rest of the account can mean a subpoena.
Facebook Legacy Contact: manages a memorialized profile, but cannot log in or read messages — a different kind of access entirely, not a lighter version of Apple's.

Apple Legacy Contact

Set up in Settings → [Your Name] → Sign-In & Security → Legacy Contact (requires two-factor authentication, iOS 15.2/macOS Monterey 12.1 or later). You can name more than one contact, and each can act independently.

Your contact gets an access key to save — after you die, they use that key plus a death certificate to access your photos, messages, notes, files, and device backups. Purchased media, subscriptions, and anything in iCloud Keychain (saved passwords, payment details, passkeys) are explicitly excluded.

Google Inactive Account Manager

A different model entirely — there's no death certificate step. You choose how long Google should wait for inactivity (it watches sign-ins, Gmail app use, and Android check-ins) before acting, and name up to 10 trusted contacts, choosing per contact what they can download: Gmail, Drive, YouTube, and more.

A contact verifies who they are with a phone number you've already given Google — nothing to prove about your death, just the waiting period elapsing. If you never set this up, Google states it may delete an account that's been inactive for two years or more.

Microsoft OneDrive Digital Legacy

The narrowest of the three, and the one where setting it up in advance matters most. From OneDrive Settings → Digital legacy, you invite one trusted contact by email. They accept, you give them a persistent access code (it never expires — safe to store with your will), and 72 hours after they enter it, they get read-only access to your OneDrive files. No death certificate needed.

This covers OneDrive only — not Outlook mail, not the rest of your Microsoft account. Skip this step, and the fallback is materially harder: next of kin generally need a death certificate and proof of relationship, and in most jurisdictions Microsoft states it will not release account contents without a subpoena or court order.

Facebook Legacy Contact — a different kind of access, not a lighter Apple

Worth naming specifically because people assume it works like Apple's, and it doesn't. A Facebook legacy contact cannot log in to your account and cannot read your private messages. Once your profile is memorialized, they can pin a post (for a memorial announcement, for instance), update your profile and cover photo, and request that the account eventually be deleted. It's a memorial-curator role, not a data-access one.

Password managers: the one most people forget

If you use Bitwarden, its Emergency Access feature (available on paid plans) lets you name a contact who can request access — you approve it yourself, or it auto-approves after a waiting period you set. You choose whether they get read-only view of your vault or full takeover (a new master password, replacing yours). 1Password has no equivalent built-in feature; its own guidance is to prepare an Emergency Kit PDF and store it with your other estate documents.

This is arguably the most consequential one on this page — a password manager is often the key to everything else, including accounts that have no legacy-contact feature of their own.

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Frequently asked questions

Do I need to set up all of these?

Set up the ones for accounts you actually use — there's no reason to configure Apple Legacy Contact if you don't own an Apple device. The password manager one is worth doing regardless of which other platforms apply to you.

What if I don't set any of these up?

Your executor falls back to each platform's own after-the-fact process, which is slower and asks for more proof — for Microsoft specifically, that can mean a subpoena or court order rather than a support request. See the related guide on digital assets after death for what that looks like from the executor's side.

Can I change or remove a legacy contact later?

Yes, on every platform covered here — none of these designations are permanent. Revisit them the same way you'd revisit a beneficiary designation, especially after a major life change.