let's talk about your digital remains! – ava's blog

let's talk about your digital remains!

15 Jun, 2026

"When I die, delete my browser history." ­— Unknown

When you die, there are lots of processes in place to deal with your body, your burial, your physical possessions, subscriptions and bank accounts. But what about your digital accounts and possessions?

As our lives become more and more digital, taking these into account when tying up the affairs of a dead person is increasingly important. Think about it: This can involve e-mail accounts, social media accounts, messengers, LLM conversations, hard drives, cloud storage, crypto wallets, websites, your digital media licenses, intellectual property you released (like four (F)OSS projects, for example), and more. In a broader sense, you might count browser history and other metadata, too!

What's interesting is that so many of these do not fall under the laws you might expect them to, like succession/inheritance law or privacy law.

Services that offer you licensed content (like Steam) have made clear in the past that family members are unable to inherit the accounts or licenses, like they would with physical items.

In terms of privacy and data protection, the GDPR applies only to living people, so you lose these rights upon death; the task of legislating the rights of the dead in these regards has been given to the Member States, which results in quite a patchwork of rights1. This patchwork makes things difficult, because it means your European country can have different laws than another, and companies will have to see how to comply with them all.

France, for example, has one of the most developed post-mortem data protection regimes in Europe. The French Data Protection Act (the Loi Informatique et Libertés) actively considers death in data protection and explicitly allows a person to give instructions regarding the retention, deletion, and communication of their personal data after death and appoint a person responsible for implementing those instructions. It mandates that controllers must follow the deceased's valid instructions, and heirs can obtain access to data necessary to settle the estate, to identify assets and liabilities, or to close user accounts and manage digital affairs.

Germany, on the other hand, is pretty much the opposite: Protection of deceased persons' data arises from a combination of post-mortem personality rights (postmortales Persönlichkeitsrecht) concluded from civil law and constitutional law, inheritance/succession law, confidentiality obligations and possibly some sector-specific laws. It's a lot more complicated and full of holes for specific types of digital data. I wish we had a law like France has!

Regardless of when we might have a European law harmonizing this aspect across Member States, it's still important to ask yourself: Who is allowed to have access to your accounts and data after you pass?

You might still want to give your younger sibling access to your Steam account later, or you need your spouse to be able to log in and keep a personal website up and running, or save pictures from the cloud. For this, you should make sure that the correct people can have access to your accounts in case of death, and know what to do with them.

How you do that is up to you: You might set up something that automatically notifies them about how to access your accounts in times of death when you don't check in for a while, or you tell them a physical location where they can find the device passwords and the Master password to your password manager. I personally mention it in my when i die page. Remember to keep this information updated!

Some companies and services, like Apple, Google and Meta, offer settings about what should happen after your death (usually called Digital Legacy tools, Inactive Account preferences, or Memorialization). You're able to set a successor/manager, deletion preferences and more, depending on the service. You have to dig a little in the settings, but if you're reading this right now, I encourage you to go find it. Good to know: Despite setting someone as a legacy contact, these companies might still request additional documents to prove that you really died.

On the other hand, it's also okay to want things to be deleted, either by family members, or automatically by the platform itself. At CPDP 2026, I participated in a workshop about digital remains, and my discussion partner said that her Instagram feels so personal that it should be deleted upon her death, but something like a LinkedIn she'd keep up.

So decide for yourself: What accounts do you want deleted, which ones can remain up/dormant? You should communicate this clearly in a way the people tasked with your digital legacy can see it, and talk to these people about it beforehand, if possible, or set it up in the settings. If you want to keep data up, is there a maximum retention period you want to set so that the data would be deleted...