What Happens to Online Accounts When Someone Dies?

When someone dies, their online life doesn't. Their Facebook profile is still there, cheerfully suggesting you wish them happy birthday. Netflix is still collecting its monthly payment. Somewhere on their phone, behind a lock screen nobody knows the code to, are ten years of photographs.

Sorting this out has quietly become part of what families do after a death, alongside the paperwork everyone expects. It's rarely urgent in the first week, with one important exception, so take this at whatever pace you can manage.

The exception: photos first

Before any account gets closed, work out where the photos live and get copies of the ones that matter. This is the single most common regret. Accounts can be reopened only rarely and reluctantly; deleted ones, essentially never. The photos are usually in some mix of the phone itself, a cloud backup tied to their Apple or Google account, and their social media. Until you know you have what you need, don't let anyone, including a well-meaning relative on a tidying mission, close or cancel anything.

If the phone is locked and nobody has the passcode, don't burn attempts guessing, as too many wrong tries can wipe some phones. The cloud copy is often the better route in.

Social media: memorialise or delete

The big platforms all have a process for death, and none of it happens until a human tells them.

Facebook offers a choice: memorialise the account, which freezes it and adds "Remembering" above their name so it becomes a place people can post tributes, or delete it permanently. If your person set up a legacy contact while alive, that named person can manage the memorial version. Either way you'll need to show evidence of the death, such as a death certificate or a published notice.

Instagram works similarly: memorialisation or removal, on request with evidence.

Other platforms vary, but the pattern is the same everywhere: search the platform's name plus "deceased", expect to upload a document, expect it to take a while.

There's no deadline on this decision, and families often sit with a memorialised profile for years. One honest caveat: a memorialised account belongs to the platform. It exists under their rules, their layout changes, and their continued existence. Some families also (or instead) gather the best photos and memories into a dedicated online memorial page they actually control, with a guestbook that isn't buried in a feed. The two things do different jobs, and there's no rule against having both.

Email, Apple and Google accounts

Email is the skeleton key of a digital life, since it's where every password reset lands, which is exactly why providers guard it after a death.

If the person planned ahead, this can be straightforward. Apple lets people name a Legacy Contact who can request access to photos and data after death with an access key and death certificate. Google's Inactive Account Manager lets people decide in advance who gets what if the account goes quiet. These settings take ten minutes to switch on and save families months. If you take one action for your own affairs after reading this, make it that.

Without prior setup, you're into each provider's next-of-kin process: forms, a death certificate, sometimes probate documents, and a wait. Access isn't guaranteed, particularly to email content. It's slow and imperfect, and it's still worth doing properly rather than quietly logging in with a password found in a notebook, which strictly speaking breaches the terms of service, however understandable it is.

Money leaks: subscriptions and direct debits

Payments don't know their owner has died. Streaming services, cloud storage, app subscriptions, the lottery, that magazine nobody remembers ordering, all of it keeps billing until cancelled. Notifying the bank freezes the account and stops direct debits from it, and going through a few months of statements is the reliable way to find subscriptions paid by card. Most companies close an account without fuss once told about a death; very few demand paperwork for a £7.99 subscription.

One thing that surprises people: the music, films and ebooks someone "bought" were nearly always licences, not property, and generally can't be inherited or transferred. The Kindle library dies with the account. Physical books have their advantages.

A note on the law

The UK has no single law covering digital assets after death, and it's genuinely messy at the edges. Data protection rights end at death, ownership of photos and writing passes with the estate but access to the accounts holding them doesn't automatically follow, and platform terms of service fill the gap. In practice, families who get the photos out early and follow each platform's bereavement process rarely need to think about any of this. If a digital asset has real financial value, cryptocurrency being the obvious one, that's a solicitor conversation and a proper part of estate planning.

Doing your own family a favour

Having done this once for someone else, most people immediately think about their own accounts. The whole job, done on a quiet Sunday:

1. Set a Facebook legacy contact, switch on Google's Inactive Account Manager, and add an Apple Legacy Contact.
2. Write a list of your accounts (no passwords needed on paper if you use a password manager with emergency access, just say where the manager is) and keep it with your will or wherever your executor will look.
3. Pick your hundred best photos and make sure they exist somewhere a named person can reach without a court order.

Nobody enjoys this admin. But you've just seen the alternative from the other side, and half an hour now is the kinder version.