Let's discuss How to Protect Your Digital Assets.
The majority of people haven't considered what happens to their Facebook account, their online photos, and emails when they die. It's important to plan ahead so the digital life of a loved one can be left in a tidy digital state. It's difficult for those left behind and could disrupt access to online accounts. For your own peace of mind and to reduce the burden on your loved ones, you should include your digital assets in your estate planning.
This is a much bigger category than many imagined before they read this. Most people immediately think of cryptocurrency, online banking accounts, and email, but it extends way beyond that. Digital assets can be broken down into three types.
Financial assets are the ones most easily identified as digital assets. This group includes things like cryptocurrency, online brokerage accounts, access to digital wallets, PayPal or Venmo balances, and any account that pays royalties or income such as an Amazon seller storefront or app developer account.
Intellectual property are the "hidden" digital assets. This is the most overlooked type of digital asset. If you have a blog or YouTube channel that is monetized, that's intellectual property. Domain names you own, any books or photos you've created that haven't been legally published, any software or code you own, and even something as universally applicable as a website, these are all digital assets and can be among the most valuable of all the types of digital assets.
Sentimental assets hold no tangible monetary value but can be the most important type of digital asset. This category is a cache of unmatched photos you have on iCloud or Google Photos, years of email correspondence, your social media accounts, personal journals in a notes app, etc. These can't be sold, but their loss can be devastating and irreplaceable on a personal and emotional level.
The issue that most families are not prepared for is this. Entering your loved one's accounts with their login information, regardless of whether they gave you permission, could be a federal crime. The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act was meant to stop hackers, but it is so broadly written that even the best of intentions can land you in a prosecutor's crosshairs. It gets worse - the major platforms' terms of service agreement and the Stored Communications Act add civil liabilities, criminal charges, and jail time into the mix.
A will does not solve any of these problems. A will gives an executor power. It is not the necessary written and notarized statement of the user, it does not relieve the website from its legally binding contract, nor does it fulfill requirements of the SCA. Most users of email have never even considered how their loved one's accounts can be legally executed and closed. Most executors have no legal ability to touch the online accounts of the deceased.
The Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act (RUFADAA) was created precisely to solve this problem. Widely adopted by most states, it provides a statutory structure for fiduciary access to digital accounts. However, it functions based on a predesignated order that most people do not know about.
Priority one goes to whatever a user has granted via the platform's own legacy tools - Apple's Legacy Contact, Google's Inactive Account Manager, Facebook's Memorialization Settings. If you've designated someone there, that control takes precedence over your will.
Priority two goes to explicit instructions in a legally executed will or trust.
Priority three - and this is the default that most people rely on - defers to the platform's own TOSA. That Terms of Service Agreement you clicked through when signing up for the account becomes the rule of your digital afterlife.
What this means simply: the platform-specific legacy tools are your first line of defense, and they are free and accessible right this moment. Go to your Apple ID settings and give a Legacy Contact some permissions. Access Google's Inactive Account Manager and arrange for another trusted Google user to receive access after a predetermined amount of your inactivity. On Facebook, allow for memorialization and decide whether an account should be destroyed. These options can be completed within the minute and are instantly legally binding terms under RUFADAA.
A complete plan needs to modify the documents you have, not just add new ones alongside them.
Your will should state that your executor has the authority to access, control, or copy your digital assets, with a detailed inventory and guidelines. If that language isn't there, and your state doesn't have its own digital property statute, there's no safety net.
Your will also should transfer all of your property to your trust. Then, if an executor needs to access an account in the short term, it's clear that they're acting as an agent of the trust.
Fortunately, these adjustments can be made with simple, straightforward changes to your existing legal documents.
For example, the executor clause in the will might look something like this:
"I authorize my executor or executrix to have access to my digital assets, as defined in applicable state law, for 60 days after the date of my death. For the purposes of this paragraph, digital assets shall not include any assets transferred to my trust."
The trusts-too clause might look like this:
"My trustee may also access my digital assets as if my trustee were me."
You'll of course want the advice of your attorney in finalizing this language to ensure that it's consistent with other provisions in your documents and your personal circumstances. Because digital asset laws like RUFADAA vary by state and sit alongside federal statutes like the SCA, the drafting matters. Working with a qualified estate planning lawyer is the step that converts an informal inventory into an enforceable legal plan - one that gives your fiduciaries the specific authority they need to bypass platform restrictions and privacy laws without legal exposure.
An executor cannot accomplish this without a map of your digital life. If you neglect to make one, your accounts will fall dormant, your cryptocurrency wallets will self-lock, and your financial accounts will go unclaimed.
For a digital inventory, record every account you have, the emails or usernames associated with it, a description of the contents of that account, and your wishes for the disposition of those assets. Physical devices count in this as well - list your computers, phones, tablets, external drives, whether they are encrypted, and how to unlock them.
What you don't want to do is list all your master passwords in your will itself. Wills go through probate court and become public record. Listing your bank login and seed phrases in a will is functionally identical to shouting them in the street.
The proper thing to do is maintain those credentials in a secure password manager or on secure media, and reference that system in your estate with instructions for how to access it. The inventory itself - names of accounts, descriptions of assets, locations of devices - can be widely shared. The keys that open the doors must be kept secure.
Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other cryptocurrency are not your typical financial assets when it comes to your estate. There's no bank to notify. There's no customer service line to dial. There's no recovery department to contact if you lose access to your holdings.
Ownership is entirely determined by whoever knows the private key - usually represented by a seed phrase, a series of 12 to 24 words that gives complete control over the wallet. If your executor doesn't know that seed phrase, tough. There's no court order, no legal argument, no hack that will get those funds back.
If you own cryptocurrency, your estate plan needs to account for hardware wallets (the actual physical device where the private key lives), the whereabouts of the seed phrase, and any multi-signature arrangements, which would require multiple key holders to authorize a transaction. Instructions need to be explicit enough that someone without a crypto background can follow them - and that's because the executor who handles your estate may not have one.
Treat crypto like bearer bonds. Whoever holds the key holds the asset. Your estate plan needs to guarantee the appropriate individual can access that key.
Your appointed representative could be the most reliable and competent person you know. They might also have no clue what a seed phrase is, how to get in touch with a domain registrar, or the process needed to transfer ownership of a monetized YouTube account.
A digital executor - sometimes listed as a co-executor with specific digital powers - is tasked with bridging that knowledge gap. This person requires enough tech know-how to navigate online services and applications, an awareness of the legal parameters that RUFADAA and various platform TOSAs put in place, and some understanding of how to transfer or end ownership of digital works without inadvertently rendering them worthless.
This won't be necessary for most people. But if you have cryptocurrency, an online business, domain registrations, significant digital IP, or really any assets that will be difficult to access or transfer without your passwords and accounts, it's probably a good idea.
According to the 2024 Estate Planning Study, just 32% of Americans have a will or estate plan. The vast majority of those documents were necessarily created without reference to digital assets - but that doesn't mean the structural omission won't come back to bite people.
The average person now has dozens of online accounts, financial assets stored in digital form, and years of irreplaceable personal content scattered across platforms designed to keep that content locked to a single user.
Digital estate planning isn't a specialty for cryptocurrency investors or tech founders. It's a baseline requirement for anyone whose life has a meaningful presence online - which, at this point, is nearly everyone.
Start with the platform tools available to you right now. Build a secure digital inventory. Then work with someone qualified to make it legally binding before the people you're planning for need it to work.
