Your Digital Legacy

In your Facebook settings, they give you ‘Memorialisation settings’ that help you plan what happens to your main Facebook profile after you die. You can appoint a legacy contact, allowing them to execute your wishes, be this memorialising your page, turning it into a tribute page, or request the removal of your account – you can also select whether they should be able to download a ‘data archive’.

Facebook also allows your loved ones to request memorialisation, or removal, even if you have not appointed a legacy contact and forms can be found in Facebook’s Help Centre.

Form to Remove Accounts

Form to Memorialise Accounts

Appointing a legacy contact and having the conversation about your wishes is the best way to ensure that your profile is memorialised/removed in line with your wishes.

Google’s Inactive Account Manager allows you to set a trusted contact who will be able to access data that you specify, from your account. They’ll only gain access after you’ve been inactive for a defined length of time (such as 3-months) and before granting access, Google will try and contact you. Setting up Google’s Inactive Account Manager, you can select which account data your trusted contacts get access to, such as your Mail data, and/or your YouTube data.

Apple allows you to appoint a Legacy Contact to your iCloud account, giving them access to data such as photos, messages, device backups and more. Apple allows you to designate more than one legacy contact, and these can be anyone that you choose – they do not have to have an Apple ID, or Apple device. When you add them as a contact, they’ll be issued with an access key, which, in tandem with your death certificate, will grant them access to your data.

Twitter automatically deactivates accounts after 6-months of inactivity and does not allow for memorialisation of accounts. Loved ones can request the removal of your account, providing some key details to Twitter to verify this. Twitter won’t ever grant access to your account, so it’s important that if you have data within your account that you’d like you loved ones to be able to access, that you’ve downloaded this for them.

Similar to Facebook, Instagram allows accounts to be removed or memorialised, however, does not have a legacy contact option. Your loved ones can contact Instagram to report your account for Memorialisation, or removal using links from Instagram’s Help Centre:

Form to Memorialise Profiles

Form to Remove Profiles

Memorialised accounts are then secured by Instagram – your loved ones won’t receive access to your account, nor will they be able to download your data; they can’t manage the tributes in the same way as Facebook, and the account is effectively frozen in time.

LinkedIn allows your loved ones to contact them to memorialise or close your account. They’ll need certain details, such as a death certificate, and a link to your profile, as well as some information about themselves. Access to your account is locked when memorialised, and a mark is added to the profile to let people who visit it know that it is active in memorial. As LinkedIn is a professional social network, you may prefer for your account to be closed rather than memorialised, and your loved ones can also do this – it can take up to 21 days for LinkedIn to delete the data from their systems, but after that, it has been permanently removed, so if you would like to share data with your loved ones, make sure to have downloaded this before.

Generally, without the username and password for a personal device, you won’t be able to access this – that means that without planning for the future, anything on your devices won’t be accessible by loved ones after you die. You may wish for some things to remain private, however, you may also store notes, plans, photos and videos on your devices, so you should consider what is right for you. You may wish to leave a note in your digital legacy with details of how to access these devices, or you may wish to store the notes, plans, photos and videos wherever you have made accessible for your loved ones.