Does Your Will Cover Your Online Accounts? What a Digital Executor Can and Cannot Do

September 14, 2026 · 8 min read

Most people assume the same document works for everything. The house, the savings, the car, the photos on the phone — write a will, name an executor, done. It is a reasonable assumption and, for your online accounts, it is usually wrong. Not because wills are weak, but because a different instruction quietly outranks them, and most people set that instruction years ago without realising it counted.

This piece is about the order of precedence: which instruction actually controls a digital legacy, what a digital executor can and cannot do once they have authority, and how to check whether the two are contradicting each other right now. It is general information rather than legal advice — the details vary by jurisdiction, and if there is real money or a business involved, a solicitor is worth the fee.

The short answer: your will is third in line

Across nearly every US state, access to legacy accounts is governed by a model law called the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act — RUFADAA. It was published by the Uniform Law Commission in 2015 and has since been enacted in 48 states plus the District of Columbia. Its most consequential feature is not that it grants access. It is that it sets a strict ranking of whose instruction wins.

1. The platform’s own online tool. If you used a feature the provider built specifically for this — Google’s Inactive Account Manager, Apple’s Legacy Contact, Facebook’s legacy contact — whatever you told it wins.
2. Your will, trust, or power of attorney. Only consulted if you never used the platform tool.
3. The provider’s terms of service. The default that applies when you gave no direction at all, and usually the least generous of the three.

Read that first item again, because it is stronger than it looks. An online-tool designation does not merely beat the terms of service. It also overrides your will, your trust, and your power of attorney. If you named your sister as executor in a will drafted last year, but in 2021 you set your university flatmate as your Apple Legacy Contact and forgot about it, the flatmate gets the iCloud data and your sister does not.

What actually counts as an online tool

The legal definition is deliberately narrow: an electronic service provided by the custodian, agreed separately from the ordinary terms of service, that lets you direct disclosure or non-disclosure of your data to a named third person. In practice that means a specific settings screen, not a support form and not a note in your password manager. The three that cover most people:

• Google Inactive Account Manager — you choose an inactivity period (3, 6, 12 or 18 months), name up to ten contacts, and choose which data each of them may download. Walkthrough: setting up Google Inactive Account Manager.
• Apple Legacy Contact — generates a unique access key. Your contact needs both that key and a death certificate before Apple will release iCloud photos, notes and backups.
• Facebook legacy contact — decides whether the profile is memorialised and who may manage it, or whether it is deleted outright.

The setup steps for all three are covered in the legacy contact setup guide. What matters here is simply that using one of them is a legal act with more force than the document you paid to have drafted.

The conflict nobody notices until it is too late

The failure is almost never dramatic. It looks like this: you set a legacy contact during a phone setup years ago, choosing whoever was standing nearest. Life moves. You marry, or you stop speaking to that person, or they change their email address and never mention it. Then you write a proper will, name a sensible executor, and reasonably believe the matter is settled.

It is not settled. Nothing in the will-drafting process reaches into your Apple ID settings, and nothing in your Apple ID settings knows a will exists. The two instructions sit in separate systems that never speak, and the older, more casual one takes priority. The family only discovers this when they are already grieving, already dealing with a bank, and now also dealing with a stranger who holds the access key to twelve years of photographs.

What a digital executor can actually do

A digital executor is not usually a separate legal office. In most jurisdictions it is a role you describe — the person you want handling accounts, devices and online admin — backed by the authority your will or trust grants them. The title carries weight because it tells everyone who is supposed to be doing this job, not because it unlocks anything by itself. If you have not appointed one, how to appoint a digital executor covers the practicalities.

Their authority has a hard ceiling worth understanding. A fiduciary is entitled only to the level of access you could have exercised yourself. They step into your shoes; they do not get a master key. And where an account is non-transferable by contract — which covers a great many subscriptions, licences and media libraries — they may be able to see information without ever assuming ownership. The film collection you bought over a decade may simply end when you do, regardless of what any document says.

So what does a will still cover?

Plenty, and it is worth being precise rather than fatalistic. Your will remains the controlling instruction wherever no platform tool exists, which is most of the internet:

• Accounts with genuine transferable value — domain names, ad revenue, a business email tenancy, an online shop.
• Cryptocurrency, where the real constraint is key custody rather than platform permission.
• Files on hardware you own: laptops, phones, external drives, a home server.
• Every provider that has never built a legacy feature, which is the overwhelming majority of them.
• Your stated wishes about what should be preserved, deleted, or never opened — which no settings screen has a field for.

A thirty-minute reconciliation

You do not need a lawyer to find a contradiction. You need an evening and a slightly uncomfortable willingness to look:

1. Open Google, Apple and Facebook and read what your legacy settings currently say. Not what you believe they say.
2. Write down each name you find, with the date you think you set it.
3. Put that list beside your will and look for disagreements — a name that appears in one and not the other is the thing you are hunting.
4. Change the platform setting, not the will, when they conflict. The platform is what will actually be obeyed.
5. Tell each person they have been named. An access key arriving unannounced is a poor way to learn you were trusted with something.
6. Diary a yearly recheck, and an immediate one after any marriage, separation, bereavement, diagnosis or falling-out.

The part none of this touches

Every mechanism above is about access: who may open the account, download the archive, close the subscription. None of it is about what you wanted to say. RUFADAA has nothing to offer on the letter to your daughter or the explanation you owe a friend, and neither does any settings screen — those tools move data, not meaning.

That gap is the argument for treating the two jobs separately. Sort the access question with the platform tools and a will that agrees with them, using the digital legacy planning guide as the checklist. Then handle the words separately and deliberately, whether that is a legacy letter written by hand or messages timed to arrive afterwards. Administration and meaning fail in different ways, and they are much easier to get right when you stop asking one document to carry both.