Your Digital Afterlife: What Happens to Your Online Accounts?

Our digital lives now encompass a vast collection of online accounts, from social media and email to financial services and cloud storage. Planning for the management of these digital assets after death or incapacity is a critical, yet often overlooked, aspect of modern life. This emerging field confronts a tangled web of technological hurdles, inconsistent legal frameworks, and systemic gaps that leave digital legacies vulnerable.

The OpenID Foundation (OIDF) is tackling this global challenge through a new whitepaper and digital estate planning guide. Dean H. Saxe, a long-time contributor to digital identity standards, explains the motivation behind this initiative. His personal interest was sparked in 2010 after a friend’s sudden passing left his family struggling to access his secured data. The concept of a “dead man’s switch” to release credentials after a period of inactivity was considered, but the low adoption of credential managers at the time shelved the idea.

The project gained new momentum in 2022. The announcement of synced passkeys by the FIDO Alliance presented a dual challenge and opportunity. While passkeys enhance security, they also create new barriers for heirs by preventing users from simply writing down login information. However, their rise also promised wider use of credential managers. After sharing these thoughts with identity standards architects, including the late Vittorio Bertocci, the concept evolved into the Death and the Digital Estate Community Group (DADE CG), officially chartered in late 2024.

Saxe believes a primary reason this issue has been neglected is a widespread cultural discomfort with discussing mortality. This natural aversion has stalled progress on creating necessary systems.

From a business perspective, companies face significant problems when users die without a clear digital plan. A common question is how to verify a customer’s death, a process that varies drastically by jurisdiction and is incredibly difficult to manage globally. A second major problem is determining who is authorized to handle the deceased’s digital assets and what their specific wishes were. While some tech giants like Apple, Google, and Facebook have implemented legacy contact features, a universal, legally sound mechanism is still missing.

The question of which digital assets should be inheritable, such as purchased media, games, or digital art, remains a complex legal matter. If they are deemed inheritable, functional pathways to enable that inheritance must be established.

Artificial intelligence introduces novel complications. Some services allow individuals to consent to posthumous AI avatars for loved ones to interact with. In other cases, AI likenesses are created without the deceased’s consent, raising profound ethical questions about the rights to a person’s digital likeness and voice.

For digital estate planning to work on a large scale, the technical infrastructure must support delegation that is verifiable, revocable, and easy for the average person to use. Relying on regulation alone to drive this change is uncertain. Without established protocols, each service provider is forced to design its own system, creating a heavy burden for individuals and estate managers. Some services even require impersonating the deceased user to close accounts, a practice open to abuse, as seen when social media accounts of the dead mysteriously post new content. The commercial incentive for providers to solve these issues remains unclear, making proactive citizenship a hopeful, but unreliable, catalyst.

In the absence of robust systems, people are already treating digital assets like “contraband,” secretly sharing passwords or creating shadow archives to circumvent official channels. This is often a recommended workaround due to the lack of better options.

To achieve a satisfactory digital handover, individuals should take several key steps. First, comprehensively document every online account, including usernames for social media, financial, insurance, and cloud storage services. Ideally, all credentials, passwords, passkeys, and one-time passwords, should be stored in a reputable credential manager like 1Password, Bitwarden, or Dashlane. This data should include explicit instructions for each account, specifying whether it should be memorialized, maintained for a set period, or deleted.

The access credentials for this master vault must be stored securely with a lawyer or trusted estate planner. Entrusting this information to a loved one carries a risk of trust being abused. Finally, working with a lawyer experienced in digital assets ensures that your specific wishes are legally documented within your estate plans.

The project itself has been an education. Early feedback revealed cultural sensitivities, such as a community member’s discomfort with the direct word “death.” This highlighted the need for protocols that are flexible enough to respect diverse global beliefs and legal practices surrounding mortality.

The ultimate goals for the whitepaper and guide are to raise public awareness and influence industry standards. The authors aim to reach large technology platforms, politicians, regulators, and standards bodies like the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). As identity standards developers, there is an obligation to consider the human identity lifecycle from birth to death, ensuring every individual receives dignity and respect. The planning guide empowers people to proactively describe, document, and manage their digital estates, providing crucial tools for protecting their legacy during a vulnerable time.

The public comment period for these documents concluded on October 24th.

(Source: HelpNet Security)