What happens to your online accounts when you die (Australia)

If you died tomorrow, could the people you love actually get into your accounts? Most Australians assume the answer is "they'll sort it out." In practice, every major platform handles death differently, the built-in tools each cover only their own corner, and none of them hand over the one thing your family needs most: your passwords. Here's how it really works — platform by platform — and where the gaps are.

This is general information to help you plan, not legal or financial advice. Where money and estates are involved, confirm the specifics with the institution and, if needed, a qualified Australian solicitor.

The short version

The big platforms — Apple, Google, Meta — have each built a "what happens when I die" feature. They're worth setting up, and they take minutes. But they share three limits: each only governs that company's own data, most exclude saved passwords entirely, and several only trigger after a long delay rather than at death. Your bank, super and brokerage sit outside all of them and follow estate law instead. So a complete plan needs the platform tools plus a secure way to pass on the credentials they don't cover.

Apple: a Legacy Contact (but not your passwords)

Apple's Legacy Contact is the cleanest of the built-in tools. You nominate someone in Settings → your name → Sign-In & Security → Legacy Contact, on a device running iOS 15.2 / macOS 12.1 or later. Apple generates an access key; your contact keeps a copy (by iMessage or printed with your estate documents). After you die, they use that key plus a copy of your death certificate to request access to your account data — photos, messages, notes, files and device backups.

Two catches matter. First, some things never pass on: per Apple, purchased movies, music and books are inaccessible, and so is everything in your iCloud Keychain — your saved passwords, passkeys and payment details. Second, without a Legacy Contact set up in advance, your family generally cannot get in at all. The feature only helps if you've done it now.

That Keychain exclusion is the crucial bit. Apple will hand over your photos but not the passwords that open your bank, your email or your share-trading account. Those live outside the platform's reach by design.

Google: Inactive Account Manager (on a timer)

Google's tool is Inactive Account Manager. You choose how long the account should sit unused before Google considers it inactive, then nominate up to 10 people to be notified and, optionally, to receive specific data (Gmail, Drive, Photos and so on). You can also tell Google to delete the account afterwards.

The design quirk: it's built around inactivity, not death. Google watches signals like your last sign-ins and Gmail use, and your nominated people are only notified once the account has been inactive for the period you set — they receive nothing at setup. If you picked a long window, your family may wait months before anything is released. It's a useful safety net, not an immediate handover.

Facebook and Instagram: memorialised, not inherited

Meta takes a different path again. A Facebook account can be memorialised — frozen as a place to remember you — or removed. You can nominate a Legacy Contact to manage the memorialised profile: they can pin a post and update your profile photo, but they cannot read your messages or log in as you. So this is about your public presence, not access to anything private inside the account.

Your bank, super and brokerage: estate law, not an app

None of the platform tools touch your money. In Australia, a bank account is frozen once the bank is notified of a death, and access is released to the estate through the executor — typically requiring a death certificate and, above a bank's threshold, a grant of probate. The process is institution-by-institution and slow; we walk through it in how to access a deceased person's accounts in Australia.

Superannuation is its own world and a common trap: your super usually isn't covered by your will, and who receives it is decided by your nomination and the fund's trustee — see what happens to your super when you die in Australia. The federal eSafety Commissioner makes the same point about online accounts generally: if you leave no instructions, your family's options are limited and vary wildly by provider.

The gap nobody fills: the passwords themselves

Put the pieces together and a pattern appears. Apple gives your family your photos but not your passwords. Google releases data on a delay. Facebook hands over a profile, not a login. Your bank waits for probate. And a long tail of accounts — your email, your brokerage, your crypto wallet, your password manager, your utilities and subscriptions — has no legacy feature at all. The credentials that actually unlock your digital life are exactly what the platform tools are built to exclude.

This is why "just write them down" keeps failing. A list of passwords in a drawer or a spreadsheet is a security risk while you're alive and often out-of-date or undiscoverable when it's needed. (We dug into why in why a password spreadsheet is riskier than it looks.)

The thing you actually want is a single, encrypted place that holds the credentials and instructions, that no company — including the one running it — can read, but that a person you name can open after you're gone. That's the whole reason ShareMyVault exists: it's zero-knowledge, so everything is encrypted on your own device before it's stored, and access is designed to be inherited through the people you name plus a recovery phrase — not locked away in a vendor's keychain. You can read exactly how that works on our security page.

A 20-minute plan you can do this week

You don't need all of this at once, but the order matters:

First, switch on the free platform tools while you're thinking about it — Apple Legacy Contact, Google Inactive Account Manager, and a Facebook Legacy Contact. They cost nothing and cover those silos. Second, sort your super: check that you have a valid binding death benefit nomination, because your will won't do it for you. Third — the part the platforms can't help with — get your actual logins (bank, email, brokerage, crypto, subscriptions) into one encrypted store with a clear path for someone you trust to open it, and tell that person where it is and how it works.

Do those three things and you've closed the gap that catches most families: not the photos or the profiles, but the keys. For a full run-through, our digital legacy checklist turns this into a step-by-step list you can work through in an afternoon.

Sources: Apple — Legacy Contact and requesting a deceased person's account; Google — Inactive Account Manager; Meta — memorialised accounts and legacy contacts; eSafety Commissioner — what happens to your digital accounts after you die.