What happens to your online accounts when you die?

Been working through the accounts of a deceased family member over the past few years. They left a password file that made its way to me so I’m able to log in to most things “as them.” My goal is to harvest anything the family might want as a memory: messages, photos, etc., and to clean up (close) all their accounts to prevent identity theft.

A few notes of interesting things I’ve found:

Observing inbound mail for over a year is by far the best way to learn where a person has accounts. I found a ton of services that weren’t listed in the password file by seeing “year end summary” or “we’ve updated our terms” emails. And then of course email access is useful to reset the password and get in.

No one sends more fucking email than politicians. It’s honestly insane how many emails came in daily to this account from all sorts of a candidates, from all over the country. The email list sharing is blatant and rampant. And without regular pruning (unsubscribing, marking as spam), the volume just grows and grows.

Some companies have very handy “close and delete this account” features. Some let you end a paid subscription, but there’s no way to remove the account. In one case I killed a subscription to a paper and then was able to log in as the deceased 4 years later! But many services do prune: in many cases, trying to log in years later failed.

When there was not a “delete account” feature, I filed a support request to delete, explaining that the account holder had passed away. When that did not work I filed a legal request to delete personal data, citing the data privacy law of the state in which the deceased resided. That worked well.

I ended up paying to keep the deceased’s phone number active for a while because I kept finding accounts that were set to send SMS codes to permit login. The deceased was good about security, which ended up costing me, ha. Notably, the mobile provider never cut off the number or seemed to notice that a dead person’s phone was still active. As long as the bill gets paid, they don’t look too closely I guess.

A side note about closing accounts.

I keep a list of services I closed or asked for my account to be removed and forgot. Today you even often have to make an account to take a look at a tech demo, because the author tries to avoid abuse of their AI service key they used for such demo.

After about two years many of these services start sending me messages again. Sometimes it turns out that the account is active again.

Recently a recruiter send me an email with a standard cold call: "I have a position that will be a perfect fit for you". I asked where she got my contact and how's that position be a perfect fit, trying to get a feel what she actually knows about me. She said she got the my profile from LinkedIn. When I asked her to post me a link to my profile it turned out the profile was closed. Somehow LI kept the profile and shared my details when she used some recruiter features. ;)

I was in the "archive/hoard everything" camp for several years and lately I've taken a very nihilistic approach at life.

I die tomorrow, I don’t think you really MUST save my stuff, especially anything digital. If I haven't already shared it with you, it's not yours to have.

Anything important like bank accounts can already be accessed by family with a death certificate; everything else, doesn't matter.

What happens to my online accounts after I die? None of my business, I'm dead.

A guy I worked with at a former employer died around 2015. Every year, for almost a decade, I get a notification from LinkedIn to congratulate him on his work anniversary.

My Steam friends list is slowly turning into a memorial.

My password manager has an emergency access feature[0] which allows my spouse to gain access to the vault (and all the passwords, passkeys, PINs, etc. in there) after 7 days. I also set this feature up with my parents so I will be able to handle their digital legacy too.

[0] https://bitwarden.com/help/emergency-access/

> Are the bits and bytes that make up our book reviews, photos, and short-form shouts into the void really so important? I say yes. These digital ephemera are part of our legacy.

Death and grief are challenging experiences and I certainly don't want to diminish anyone's suffering. That said, I prefer to take the opposite approach and acknowledge that digital ephemera are truly not very important, with the small exception of a relatively short period (<10 years) after your death. I don't exactly have a "solution" in mind, but I reject the notion that we should preserve online artifacts forever as part of an individual's legacy.

I don't think the author was necessarily suggesting that online artifacts should be preserved forever, but this line stuck out to me and I felt that I didn't agree with the sentiment.

My son gets my 1pw master password and yubikey and inherits all my online accounts.

An old friend passed away a few years ago, and sadly all of our Facebook messages have disappeared forever. I really wish that I could read them again. It’s very sad.

Oh well.

There is an ex coworker who died about 10 years ago. People on LinkedIn still congratulate him annually with his work anniversaries.

I intend to make sure people know how to use my email. With that, and my phone, they should have access to all accounts indirectly via password resets through that email address. I won't bother with a long digital will or handing over a password manager or anything like that, this sounds like way too much complexity. One account - the email.

I kind of wish there was an inactive account setting as default, where every account was disabled after 1 year of inactivity (but keept the user name to prevent squatting), then sent a yearly reminder and deleted them after 10 years or something.

This article really resonated with me. A few years ago, I lost a friend, and their dormant social media accounts became these strange digital echoes... like finding an old voicemail you forgot existed.