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. ;)

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.

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/

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

I made arrangements for my family to have access to my accounts and instructions on deleting most of them, with special emphasis on linked-in.

I can't even guess at the number of accounts I haven't touched in 10+ years.

presumably there are a great and growing number of people who will have no one to clean up there online presence, and depending on how things are set up, and how much money is floating there, possibly earning, then itd hard to say how long things might last. where things will get tricky is with personal AI, that could in such a case, become imortal if so instructed, or rather, given the scale and general wierdness of things, there must be something like that happening now so one more trueism is gone, you CAN take it with you when you die

All will go to my daughter

My brother passed a few years ago. I was able to "memorialize" his Facebook account, or whatever they call that term. Found a link on their web site, uploaded a scanned copy of the death certificate, and within a day or so the title to his page was changed to something like "Remembering Joe Blow..." People could still post on his page, but nobody could log in under his name (just in case his account got hacked or something). It was pretty easy to do.

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