Someone close to me lost their dad last year. Lovely bloke, big Facebook presence, thousands of photos, years of memories stored neatly in albums. When she tried to get into his account to download those photos, Facebook told her it couldn’t help without a court order. She spent four months trying to sort it. She’s still not done. This is the reality of digital inheritance law UK families are bumping into right now, and honestly, the law hasn’t got a clue what to do about it.
We own more digital stuff than ever. Email archives going back fifteen years. Instagram accounts with hundreds of followers. Spotify playlists that took a decade to curate. Cryptocurrency wallets potentially worth thousands. And when we die, almost all of it falls into a legal void that England and Wales has been spectacularly slow to address.
Why digital assets are so legally awkward
Here’s the core problem. When you sign up to Google, Meta, Apple, or pretty much any major platform, you’re not buying anything. You’re licensing access. The account belongs to the platform. The Terms of Service for most major services explicitly state that accounts are non-transferable and die with the user. So even if your will says “I leave my Instagram to my daughter”, you haven’t actually left her anything the law recognises as property.
Physical assets are straightforward. Your house, your car, your vinyl collection, these pass through your estate under the Administration of Estates Act 1925. But a social media profile? An email inbox? These aren’t covered. The Law Commission flagged this gap as far back as 2021 and has been crawling towards reform ever since. As of 2026, there is still no dedicated legislation in England and Wales that clearly defines who owns your digital life after you die.
Cryptocurrency is a separate beast but equally messy. The good news there: crypto can genuinely be inherited because ownership is defined by whoever holds the private key, not by any company’s terms. If you die holding Bitcoin and your family has the seed phrase, they can access the wallet. If they don’t, that money is gone forever. Millions of pounds worth of crypto is estimated to be permanently inaccessible because people died without passing on their keys. The Law Commission’s 2023 report confirmed that crypto-tokens are recognised as a form of personal property under English law, which is at least a start.
What each major platform actually lets your family do
The platforms vary wildly in how helpful they are, and I’d say most of them fall somewhere between “mildly useless” and “actively obstructive”.
Facebook and Instagram (Meta): Meta has a Memorialisation feature where a verified death turns an account into a memorial page. A designated Legacy Contact (you can set one up now in your settings) can manage this page, pin posts, and respond to friend requests. But they cannot read your private messages, and downloading your full data archive requires Meta’s specific verification process, which can take months.
Google: Google’s Inactive Account Manager is actually the most useful tool of the lot. You can pre-authorise up to ten people to download your Gmail, Google Drive, Google Photos, and YouTube data after a set period of inactivity. If you haven’t set this up, a family member can submit a request to Google’s dedicated team, but there’s no guarantee they’ll hand anything over without substantial proof.
Apple: Apple introduced a Digital Legacy feature in 2021. You can assign Legacy Contacts who receive a special access key, which combined with a death certificate gives them access to photos, notes, mail, and iCloud backups. Without this set up in advance, Apple will not give a family member access, full stop.
X (Twitter): No legacy tools whatsoever. Family members can request account deactivation with a death certificate, but they cannot get access to the account content or data.
What families can actually do right now
Don’t wait for Parliament to sort this out. They won’t get there quickly, and in the meantime, people’s digital lives are being locked away from the people who loved them.
The most practical thing anyone can do is create a digital estate plan. This doesn’t need to be complicated. Write a document listing every account, the associated email address, and ideally a way for your executor to access a password manager. Don’t put raw passwords in your will itself, since wills become public documents after probate. Instead, store them in a secure password manager like 1Password or Bitwarden, and leave the master password (or the manager’s recovery kit) somewhere physically secure, such as in a sealed envelope with your solicitor or in a home safe.
For crypto specifically, your seed phrase needs to exist somewhere offline and accessible. A metal backup stored securely is a good shout. Hardware wallets like Ledger or Trezor should come with clear instructions left for your family. The gov.uk guidance on wills and probate is a useful starting point, but it says next to nothing about digital assets, which tells you everything about where the law currently sits.
You should also:
- Set up Google’s Inactive Account Manager today. It takes ten minutes.
- Assign an Apple Digital Legacy Contact if you’re in the Apple ecosystem.
- Add a Legacy Contact on Facebook.
- Update your will to mention digital assets explicitly, even if the law doesn’t fully back you up yet. It signals your intent and helps executors.
Solicitors who specialise in estate planning are only just getting up to speed on this stuff. If you’re going through probate right now and need to access a deceased person’s accounts, you’ll likely need to contact each platform’s bereavement or trust and safety team individually, armed with a death certificate and proof of your relationship to the deceased. It’s slow, inconsistent, and frankly absurd in 2026.
Why this is going to get more urgent, fast
The generation currently reaching old age is the first to have spent significant chunks of their lives online. Their email accounts contain medical records, financial documents, sentimental correspondence, irreplaceable photographs. The volume of digital assets left behind at death is only going to grow.
There’s also the emotional dimension that gets overlooked in legal discussions. Speaking of which, if you’ve read our piece on AI companions and how technology is changing our emotional lives, you’ll know that some people are already using AI tools to interact with “digital versions” of deceased loved ones built from their social media data. That raises enormous ethical questions about data ownership after death, questions that current digital inheritance law UK frameworks simply aren’t equipped to handle.
The broader tech landscape is moving faster than regulators can keep up with, which we’ve seen play out in plenty of other areas too. Biometric data at UK airports is another place where the law is scrambling to catch up with what’s already being deployed in practice.
The crypto wallet problem deserves its own conversation
I want to come back to crypto because it’s where digital inheritance law UK is both most advanced and most dangerous. Courts in England and Wales have confirmed that crypto is property, which means it can be left in a will. But legal recognition means nothing if no one can actually access the wallet.
If you hold significant crypto, please, I’m begging you, sort out your key management situation. There are solicitor-held escrow services starting to emerge specifically for this purpose. Some people split their seed phrase using a method called Shamir’s Secret Sharing, where multiple trusted people each hold a fragment that only works in combination. It’s the kind of thing that sounds paranoid until someone you know loses £40,000 in Bitcoin because their husband kept the seed phrase in his head.
The Law Commission is still working through its digital assets review, and reform will come eventually. But “eventually” is cold comfort for families dealing with grief and bureaucratic brick walls at the same time. Sort your digital estate now. Your family will thank you for it, even if they’ll never quite understand what a seed phrase is.