Who inherits your accounts if you do nothing at all

Calling a mailbox yours is a habit that misleads. In law an account is a permission to use a service, granted by a company, and permissions expire. The iCloud terms contain a section named exactly that: No Right of Survivorship. Apple's wording is blunt — the account is non-transferable and any rights to it terminate upon death; the same clause says that on receipt of a copy of a death certificate the account may be closed and its contents deleted. Two exceptions exist: the Digital Legacy mechanism and requirements of law.

Similar clauses sit almost everywhere. Valve states plainly that it does not recognise transfers of Steam subscriptions made outside Steam, including transfers by operation of law. In May 2024 its support gave a user the same answer: content cannot be moved into somebody else's account.

Legislation is catching up slowly and unevenly. In 2018 the German Federal Court of Justice sided with the parents of a girl who had died (case III ZR 183/17): heirs get access to a social network account the way they would get her paper letters. In Russia Article 1112 of the Civil Code includes things, other property and property rights in an estate, but not rights inseparably tied to the person; the Federal Notarial Chamber acknowledged as early as 2021 that no settled order of account inheritance exists.

Where a tool exists, it almost always hands over an archive rather than keys. Google's Inactive Account Manager asks you to set a silence period between three and eighteen months and to name up to ten trusted people, each with their own selection. They receive a download link that lives for about three months. The password is never given to anyone; nobody can sign in and reply in your name. The tool covers personal accounts only and not Workspace.

Apple has offered a Legacy Contact since iOS 15.2: the person arrives with an access key and a death certificate and receives iCloud Photos, notes, mail, contacts, calendars, reminders, Messages in iCloud, iCloud Drive files and device backups. They do not receive purchased films, music and books, in-app purchases and subscriptions, payment details, or the contents of Keychain. That last item deserves a second reading: passwords are not inherited, and passwords are what opens everything else. The access window is three years from approval of the first request, after which the account is deleted.

Meta memorialises the page; a designated legacy contact can pin a farewell post and, if you allowed it, download an archive, but nobody can sign in and read Messenger conversations. Instagram has no legacy contact at all: relatives with documents have essentially one available action, requesting deletion. Microsoft's digital legacy covers OneDrive only — a trusted person enters a code, waits 72 hours and gets read-only files; mail, Xbox and purchases go through the separate Next of Kin procedure.

The general rule sounds dull and decides nearly everything: where a tool exists, it is off by default, and nobody will turn it on for you. In the United States the model law RUFADAA gives priority to a setting made inside the service over an instruction in a will. The checkbox outweighs the paper.

In a digital store the Buy button almost never means “receive a file”. The Kindle terms say so without hedging: the content is licensed to you, not sold. A licence is personal and non-transferable, which means a library of three hundred books exists exactly as long as the account does.

A storefront can also simply close. On 18 July 2025 Microsoft stopped selling films and television in its store without an announcement, promising that purchases would remain available in the app and offering no refunds. In California, AB 2426 has applied since 1 January 2025: a store may not say “buy” where access can be revoked, unless it clearly explains that a licence is being sold.

The flip side matters more than it seems. Anything downloaded as an unprotected file — mp3, epub, photographs, documents — is inherited like a box of papers: whoever gets the drive gets the contents. The boundary runs precisely between “I have the file” and “I have access”.

The newest part of an estate is a conversation history with an AI assistant, and it is also the least protected. An ordinary messenger has a second copy: your words remain with the person you were talking to. With an assistant there is no second party — there is a service for which this is operational data with a retention period.

The periods are visible in the help pages. At OpenAI, deleted chats are permanently removed from the systems within about 30 days. At Gemini, history is erased after 18 months by default and can be set to 3, 36 or switched off. Conversations that went to human review are kept by Google for up to three years, detached from the account and not returned to you. Death is not an event here: the service does not know about it and keeps counting on its own clock.

Storage of conversations should not be confused with the feature called memory. The assistant keeps a short note about you, roughly a page or two — users have measured about fifteen hundred words, and nobody publishes an official figure. The note holds facts about a person: age, profession, preferences. An archive holds their words. In twenty years the facts will be worth almost nothing and the words will be worth everything.

And a third clock: the life of the service itself. The Soulmate app closed in the autumn of 2023. On 5 September 2025 the team behind the Dot app announced its closure and switched the service off on 5 October, leaving a month for exports — and the export button itself, judging by the update notes, appeared only in August. The window for rescuing an archive is opened by somebody else's company, lasts weeks, and falls at the worst possible moment.

In CODE Eternal a conversation is not trimmed: every exchange is appended to the archive with a timestamp, and when the live block grows to roughly 68 kilobytes what has accumulated is sealed into a separate immutable chunk. A person is identified not by name but by a fingerprint of their email address (sha256), so inheritance is tied neither to a device nor to an application that may disappear.

Memory is split into the three PADAM layers: operational in Redis or Vercel KV, semantic in pgvector, eternal in Arweave with a mark on the blockchain. Encryption is AES-256-GCM with a separate key per person, and the key itself is stored wrapped by a master key inside a protected server environment. Arweave is paid once: the network's model is built for two hundred years and rests on the fact that over the past half-century storage costs have fallen by roughly 38% a year on average.

Now the limits, without which this would be an advertisement. The server can decrypt the conversation — otherwise it could neither be remembered nor handed to an heir. An heir receives records and a digital passport, not a talking copy of a person. Handover of access is provided on the Family Archive ($100 a month) and Digital DNA ($1,000 once per device and $200 a month thereafter) plans; there is no ready-made “heir” role with a button in the cabinet today. On Spark ($15 a month) the conversation is saved and encrypted in the same way, but no configured handover exists there.

Open Inactive Account Manager at Google and set a silence period and trusted people. Add a Legacy Contact at Apple and keep the access key it issues alongside your documents. Appoint a legacy contact on Facebook, or conversely instruct that the profile be deleted. Check account self-destruction in Telegram — the default is 18 months without a sign-in.

Then a password manager with emergency access: Bitwarden lets you set a waiting period from one day to ninety, and 1Password has a printed Emergency Kit. Passwords do not go into a will: after death the document stops being a secret, passwords go stale, and in Russia a certificate of inheritance is generally issued after six months (Article 1154 of the Civil Code) — while Google deletes a personal account after two years of silence.

One last step that costs nothing: tell two people out loud that you have done all this and where the instructions are. A setting nobody knows about does not work. We are not lawyers, and everything listed here is a starting point for a conversation with a notary, not a substitute for one.