Digital assets: your accounts, photos and crypto when you die

An executor with a probate certificate can transfer a house. The same executor, same certificate, can spend six months failing to get into a Gmail account. Digital assets are where 20th-century estate law meets terms-of-service agreements, and the terms of service usually win.

The legal gap, briefly

Your photos, emails, domain names, channel revenue, loyalty points and crypto are assets or near-assets — but access to them is governed by each platform’s contract, and most contracts prohibit password sharing and terminate at death. Saskatchewan enacted Canada’s first fiduciary-access statute in 2020, and the Uniform Law Conference has a model act, but in Ontario, BC and Alberta your executor’s legal right to access (as opposed to own) digital property remains patchy. Practical planning beats legal doctrine here.

Do the platforms’ own tools first

Ten minutes, enormous payoff:

• Apple Digital Legacy — name legacy contacts who can access your iCloud data with a key and a death certificate. Without this, Apple requires a court order and still may not decrypt.
• Google Inactive Account Manager — after a chosen inactivity period, hand picked data to picked people, or delete.
• Facebook/Instagram — a legacy contact can memorialise; you can opt for deletion instead.
• Password manager emergency access — 1Password, Bitwarden and others support trusted emergency contacts, which in practice solves half of everything else.

The will’s role

The will can gift digital property (“my photo archive to my daughter”) and should give the executor explicit authority over digital assets — modern wills, including ours, include a digital-assets clause empowering the executor to access, manage and close accounts to the extent the law and contracts allow. What the will must not contain is passwords: a probated will is a public court document.

The inventory is the actual plan

None of the above works if nobody knows the account exists. The real deliverable is a maintained list — accounts, where they live, what should happen to each, and how access works — kept current and findable. That is precisely what the estate record is for: digital assets sit alongside your house and your RRSP, with notes and documents attached, shareable read-only with your executor. The will says who gets it; the record says what exists and how to reach it.