Legacy contacts and memorialisation
Apple, Google and Facebook each let you name who gets into your account after you die. Under Florida law those settings beat your will, your trust, and your power of attorney. Almost nobody sets them.
Most of this archive is people finding out too late that a document said something they did not expect. This entry is about the opposite: a thing you can do this evening that will save your family a court proceeding.
Fla. Stat. §740.003(1) — the first operative provision of Florida's Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act — says that where a custodian provides an online tool allowing a user to direct disclosure or non-disclosure of digital assets, and the tool lets the user change that direction at any time, the direction overrides a contrary instruction in a will, trust, power of attorney, or other record.
That is not a metaphor. Your Google settings beat your will. A page you can change in ten seconds sits above a document you paid a lawyer to draft, because it is the most recent, most specific, most obviously deliberate expression of your intent about that account.
Three companies hold the overwhelming majority of the ordinary person's digital life, and all three provide the tool. Here is exactly what each one does, and what each one refuses to do.
Legacy Contact: an 88-digit key and a death certificate
Apple introduced Legacy Contact with iOS 15.2 in December 2021. You name one or more people; Apple generates an access key; you give them a copy, or store it somewhere they will find it. After your death they present the access key and a death certificate to Apple and request access.
What they get: Apple describes it as your Apple Account data — photos, messages, notes, files, device backups, and more.
What they do not get, in Apple's own words: “movies, music, books, or subscriptions you purchased with your Apple Account, and data stored in your iCloud Keychain (payment information, passwords, and passkeys).”
Both exclusions matter and for different reasons. The media exclusion is the licence problem — you never owned it, so it cannot pass. The Keychain exclusion is the one that catches families out: naming a legacy contact does not hand anybody your passwords, so every account that is not an Apple account is still locked. That is a deliberate design decision and it is the right one, but it means Legacy Contact is one part of a plan rather than the plan.
Apple documents that legacy access is time-limited — reported as three years from approval of the first legacy access request, after which the account is permanently deleted. Which is another way of saying: set it up, and also tell your family that the clock starts running.
Inactive Account Manager: a dead man's switch, on a timer
Google's tool is structurally different and, for most families, the most useful of the three. It is not triggered by a death certificate. It is triggered by inactivity.
You set a waiting period — the setup flow offers 3, 6, 12 or 18 months — and Google watches for signs of life across your account. Before acting it attempts to reach you at a recovery phone number and email. If the period elapses with no response, the plan runs.
You may name up to 10 people, and — this is the part worth spending five minutes on — you choose which data each of them receives. Gmail, Drive, Photos, YouTube, Contacts, Calendar, Location History, and the rest are individually selectable. Your sister can get the photographs without getting fifteen years of email.
Each named person receives an email listing the data you chose for them and a link to download it, valid for a limited window widely documented as about three months. You can also write an auto-reply for Gmail, and you can instruct Google to delete the account entirely once the plan has run.
Two practical notes that decide whether this works. First, give Google a mobile number for each contact that they will still control years from now — identity is verified against it before anything is released. Second, the download window is short. Tell the people you named that they are named, or the notification arrives, sits in a spam folder, and expires.
And a background fact that makes the tool matter more than it used to: Google reserves the right to delete an account that has been inactive across its services for at least two years where no plan is in place. Doing nothing is itself a choice with an outcome.
Memorialisation: the account stops being an account
Meta's approach is different again, because a social profile is not really a filing cabinet — it is a public place, and the problem it has to solve is that the public place keeps behaving as though the person is alive.
Memorialisation freezes it. The profile remains, “Remembering” appears next to the name, existing content stays visible to whoever could already see it, and the account stops surfacing in birthday reminders and “people you may know.” Nobody can log in.
You may nominate a legacy contact, who must be a Facebook friend and who gains their powers only after the account is memorialised. What they can do, per Meta's own help pages:
- Write a pinned post on the profile — the notice, the service details, the message the family wants at the top.
- Update the profile picture and cover photo.
- Request removal of the account.
- Download a copy of what you shared, if you enabled that when you nominated them.
What a legacy contact expressly cannot do: log into the account, read your messages, or remove friends and send friend requests. The private correspondence stays private. That is a defensible line, and it is also the reason a legacy contact is not a substitute for an estate plan — the messages are frequently where the useful information is.
The alternative, chosen in the same settings screen, is to have Facebook delete the account permanently when it learns of your death. There is no third option, and if you pick neither, your family will be arguing about which one you would have wanted at the worst possible moment.
Instagram offers memorialisation as well, on request with proof of death, but does not offer a legacy contact. LinkedIn, X and most other platforms have a request process and no user-facing tool at all — which pushes those accounts down to tier two of Chapter 740, where your will has to do the work.
What none of them solve
Set all three and you have done more for your executor than most forty-page estate plans manage. You have not finished.
Passwords are excluded by design. Apple's Keychain is out. Google's plan releases exported data, not credentials. Meta's legacy contact never logs in. Every account outside those three ecosystems — the bank, the brokerage, the domain registrar, the crypto exchange, the utility, the two-factor app — is untouched.
The second factor is the real lock. A phone number that gets disconnected during the first week after a death takes every SMS-based two-factor code with it. Do not cancel the mobile line until the accounts are dealt with; it is the single most common irreversible mistake in the first month.
Password managers are where this is actually solved. Most of the major ones offer an emergency-access or recovery feature that names a trusted person and releases the vault after a delay you set — the same architecture as Google's, applied to everything at once. Setting one up is the highest-value thirty minutes in digital estate planning, and it is the step almost nobody takes.
And none of it is a substitute for the documents. Chapter 740 tier one is a settings page. Tier two is your will, your trust, and your power of attorney — and they have to say the right words, because §740.006 needs your consent to disclosure of content and §740.008 needs an express grant of authority over the content of electronic communications. The tools and the documents are not alternatives. They are two halves of the same instruction, and they have to agree with each other.
Timeline
- 2015Facebook introduces legacy contacts, adding a middle option between a live account and deletion.
- 2015The Uniform Law Commission approves RUFADAA, restructured around user direction with the online tool at the top of the priority ladder.
- Jul 1, 2016Florida's Chapter 740 takes effect. §740.003(1) makes an online-tool direction override a contrary instruction in a will, trust, or power of attorney.
- 2019
- Dec 2021Apple ships Legacy Contact in iOS 15.2 — access key plus death certificate, with purchased media and the iCloud Keychain expressly excluded.
- 2023Google begins enforcing its inactive-account policy, reserving the right to delete accounts unused across its services for at least two years where no plan is set.
- 2026All three tools are free, take minutes, and sit above every estate-planning document in Florida's priority order. Most Florida estates still arrive with all three unset.
What actually went wrong
- Tier one is empty in most estates. The highest-priority instrument in Florida digital-asset law is a settings page, and it is almost always blank — which pushes everything down to a will that usually does not mention digital assets either.
- The named person is never told. A legacy contact who does not know they are one, or who cannot find the access key, is the same as no legacy contact. Google's download links expire; Apple's request needs a key.
- The settings and the will contradict each other. When the online tool names one person and the will names another, §740.003(1) resolves it in the settings page's favour — and the family finds out during the worst month of their lives.
- The phone gets cancelled in week one. Disconnecting the mobile line takes every SMS two-factor code with it and locks the estate out of accounts nobody has looked at yet.
- People set the tools and stop. Legacy Contact excludes the Keychain, Google's plan releases data rather than credentials, and a Facebook legacy contact never logs in. Everything outside those three companies still needs a password manager and a drafted clause.
Would it have gone that way in Florida?
This IS the Florida rule. §740.003(1) puts the online tool at the top, above the will — and the tools are free.
Florida's Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act, Chapter 740, took effect July 1, 2016. It applies where the user resides in Florida or resided in Florida at the time of death — §740.08 — regardless of where the company is. A Sarasota decedent's Gmail account is within its reach.
The priority ladder is §740.003, and it has three rungs in strict order. (1) The online tool. A direction given through a custodian's online tool that the user may modify or delete at any time overrides a contrary direction in a will, trust, power of attorney, or other record. (2) The estate-planning document. Where the custodian offers no tool, or the user did not use it, the user may direct or prohibit disclosure in a will, trust, power of attorney, or other record. (3) The terms of service. A direction under (1) or (2) overrides a contrary provision in a terms-of-service agreement that did not require the user to act affirmatively and separately from assenting to the terms generally — which is to say, clicking “I agree” at signup was never a decision about your estate.
What the tools cannot fix, and what the statute says about it. §740.004(2) provides that Chapter 740 gives a fiduciary no new or expanded rights beyond those held by the user — so a licence stays a licence and a private key stays lost. §740.05(2) subjects fiduciary authority to the terms of service, to other law including copyright, to the scope of the fiduciary's duties, and says it may not be used to impersonate the user. Logging in as the deceased is not the plan, no matter who has the password.
What the statute does that the tools do not. Where the online tool is unset or does not cover an account, the personal representative works the procedure. §740.007 entitles them to the catalogue — who was written to, when, at what address, and therefore which banks, brokers, insurers and subscription services existed — on a written request plus a certified death certificate and certified letters of administration, with no consent record required. §740.006 reaches the content of communications, but only where the user consented through an online tool or a record, or a court directs. §740.06 gives the custodian 60 days to comply and lets the fiduciary ask a Florida circuit court to compel it. For most estates the catalogue does the real work and the content is never needed.
Two Florida provisions people miss. §740.05(5) confirms that a fiduciary with authority over the decedent's tangible personal property may access that property and any digital asset stored in it, and is an authorised user for purposes of Florida's computer-crimes chapter, chapter 815. That is what lets a personal representative pick up the laptop and the phone without committing an offence under §815.06. And §740.11 confirms that nothing done under Chapter 740 changes the duty under §732.901 to deposit the will with the clerk within 10 days of learning of the death — finding the will in the cloud does not make it private.
The honest caveat. Chapter 740 is a disclosure statute aimed at custodians. It moves paperwork; it does not move assets. It cannot un-delete an account the company already removed (§740.005(3)), it cannot compel a platform with no US presence, and it has nothing to say about a wallet with no custodian.
Do this, in this order, this week. One: set the three tools — Apple Legacy Contact, Google Inactive Account Manager, Facebook memorialisation — and tell the people you named. Two: set emergency access in your password manager, because that is the only mechanism that reaches everything else. Three: get the §740 language into the will, the trust, and the durable power of attorney, including the express grant of authority over the content of electronic communications that §740.008 requires. Four: keep a one-page list of what exists and where, stored separately from the will. Step one takes ten minutes and outranks steps three and four. That is not a criticism of lawyers; it is what the statute says.
What people ask us about this.
Further reading
Third-party sites. Not ours, not endorsed, not kept current by us — just the places worth going next.
Sources
- How to add a Legacy Contact for your Apple Account — Apple Support
- About Inactive Account Manager — Google Account Help
- Inactive Google Account policy — Google Account Help
- How to set up Google's Inactive Account Manager — Android Police
- What is a legacy contact and what can they do with my Facebook account? — Meta / Facebook Help Center
- Fla. Stat. §740.003 — User direction for disclosure of digital assets — The Florida Senate
- Fla. Stat. §740.05 — Fiduciary duty and authority — The Florida Senate
- Fla. Stat. §740.007 — Disclosure of other digital assets of deceased user — The Florida Senate
- Fla. Stat. §740.08 — Applicability — The Florida Senate
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Nearly every case in this archive turned on something ordinary — an unwitnessed page, a stale beneficiary line, a document nobody could find. Those are cheap to fix while you're alive and expensive to fix afterward.