When a woman died unexpectedly, her sister spent months trying to access her email account — not for sentimental reasons, but because two years of tax records, the login for her mortgage servicer, and the only copy of digital photos from the last decade lived nowhere else. The email provider required a court order to grant access, even to the appointed executor. The sister eventually got it. It took four months and a specific set of documents nobody had told her she’d need, for an account that, functionally, was the front door to the rest of the estate.
Being named executor doesn’t automatically open digital accounts
For centuries, estate law assumed assets were physical or at least had a paper trail — a house, a bank account, a stock certificate. Digital assets broke that assumption: email accounts, social media profiles, cloud storage, and cryptocurrency wallets are governed by the terms of service of private companies, which historically had no legal obligation to grant a deceased user’s family or executor any access at all, regardless of what a will said. States responded with the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act (RUFADAA), now adopted in some form by the large majority of states, which establishes a legal framework for how executors, trustees, and agents under a power of attorney can obtain authorized access to a deceased or incapacitated person’s digital accounts.¹
The tool that decides everything before RUFADAA even applies
Here’s the detail that surprises most people: under RUFADAA, if the deceased used an “online tool” provided by the service itself — Google’s Inactive Account Manager, Facebook’s Legacy Contact setting, Apple’s Legacy Contact feature — to designate who should have access after death, that designation legally controls and overrides even instructions in the person’s own will.² A will that says “my executor should have access to all my digital accounts” can be superseded by a platform-specific setting the deceased configured, or failed to configure, years earlier and never thought about again. If no online tool designation exists, RUFADAA then looks to the person’s will, trust, or power of attorney for explicit authorization — and if that’s silent too, the fallback is each individual platform’s own terms of service, which is where the four-month ordeal above actually originated.
Why RUFADAA deliberately doesn’t hand over everything
Even with proper legal authorization, RUFADAA draws a meaningful line between two categories of digital assets. Account catalogs — a list of contacts, photos, files, and general account information — are generally accessible to a properly authorized fiduciary. The actual content of electronic communications — the text of emails, private messages, direct messages — is treated with a higher bar of protection, and many providers will only release that content if the deceased explicitly consented to it in advance, whether through the platform’s own tool, a will, or another legal document.³ This distinction exists because private correspondence carries privacy expectations for the other party in the conversation too — someone who emailed the deceased didn’t necessarily consent to their messages being read by an executor after the fact.
The asset class that behaves nothing like the rest of this list
Cryptocurrency deserves separate mention because it fails in a way no other digital asset does: a lost password to an email account can eventually be recovered through a provider’s identity verification process. A lost private key or seed phrase to a cryptocurrency wallet generally cannot be recovered by anyone — not the family, not the executor, not even the exchange, if the wallet is self-custodied. There is no customer service line to call and no court order that reconstitutes a lost cryptographic key. Cryptocurrency holdings without a documented, securely stored recovery method are, upon the holder’s death, functionally gone — not legally transferred to anyone, simply permanently inaccessible.
The document that actually solves this, and it isn’t the will
A will is a public document once it’s filed with the probate court — exactly the wrong place to list account passwords and security question answers. The practical solution most estate attorneys recommend is a separate, private document — sometimes called a digital asset inventory or included as part of a broader letter of instruction — that lists accounts, platforms, and where credentials or recovery information can be found (ideally in a password manager with the master credentials shared securely with a trusted person or attorney, rather than written out in the letter itself). This document has no formal legal power on its own, but it’s the map that makes everything else — the will’s authorization, the RUFADAA request, the executor’s actual work — possible to execute in practice rather than in theory.
Set the platform tool, name the digital fiduciary, write the map
Three concrete actions cover most of what digital estate planning actually requires: configure the legacy or inactive-account tool on major platforms where one exists, since RUFADAA gives that setting priority over everything else; explicitly authorize digital asset access for your executor or agent in your will or power of attorney, so a fallback exists where no platform tool is available; and maintain a private, securely stored inventory of accounts and access information, updated as accounts change, so the authorization granted on paper actually has something to act on.
Sources
1. Uniform Law Commission, Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act (2015), adopted in some form by the large majority of U.S. states as of 2026 — legal framework governing fiduciary access to a deceased or incapacitated person’s digital assets.
2. Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act — priority given to a user’s designation made through an online tool provided by a custodian (e.g., Google Inactive Account Manager, Facebook Legacy Contact) over conflicting instructions in a will.
3. Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act — distinction between fiduciary access to a catalog of electronic communications versus the content of electronic communications, with content access requiring the user’s explicit prior consent.
This article is for educational purposes only and does not constitute legal, tax, or financial advice. Digital asset access laws vary by state and by platform terms of service. Consult a licensed estate attorney to incorporate digital asset planning into your estate plan.