Every claim on this site carries one verification date: July 28, 2026. Guides to this subject decay, and several errors now in circulation trace back to the year they started.
A Louisiana statute that was never enacted circulates formatted like real law, citation number attached. Guides list California as a non-adopting state. Some credit X with launching memorialization, and 1Password with a digital-legacy tool it never shipped. Neither feature exists, and both claims still turn up in material written in 2026.
None of that is unusual for this subject, because the underlying policies change without announcements and the guides copy one another. Dates are the defense. A claim with a date attached can be re-checked, and a claim without one can’t be told apart from a guess.
One page here has a real deadline. Saving the photos and files runs against clocks that keep counting during the rest of the work.
This page is about how the site handles a moving target, and what it refuses to claim. Three habits do most of that work. Claims get a date, absence gets labeled as absence, and hedged findings stay hedged instead of hardening into plain ones. Each section below shows one of those habits failing somewhere in the wider literature.
Nothing on this site has had a legal review, because the project has no reviewer configured to escalate a legal question to. That gap belongs on the record. Anything here that touches a decision belongs in front of an estate lawyer before you act on it.
Where the phantom laws and wrong numbers come from
The law at issue has a name. RUFADAA, the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act, dates from 2015, and each state adopts a version of its own.
Louisiana has enacted neither that act nor its predecessor. Its 2016 bill died in conference, and the text of that dead bill now circulates formatted like an enacted statute.
A fake citation travels with it, formatted exactly like a real one and pointing at nothing. An AI summary made matters worse. One such summary invented a repeal citation, and the citation it produced pointed at an unrelated blockchain act. Massachusetts has enacted neither one either, and bills H.4639 and S.1110 were pending there in early 2026.
California is the opposite error, because the state enacted its version in 2016 and later extended that law to conservators and to agents. The extension took effect on January 1, 2025. Sources that still list California as a non-adopting state are repeating a map error from 2017, and commercial guides carried it into 2026.
Counting conventions cause a third problem. Adoption totals between 38 and 48 circulate at once, and the state page sets out which convention this site uses.
This site counts 47 states plus the District of Columbia, excluding Delaware and counting the District on its own. Other sources say 48. Delaware keeps a broader predecessor act from 2014 rather than the model law the other states took up. Neither number is wrong—the gap between them is a convention, not a fight about which states have laws.
A 2026 story about memorialization on X traces to a single unsourced marketing article, and echoes a Twitter announcement from November 2019. That feature never shipped. As of July 28, 2026, 1Password offered no digital-legacy tool, and the claim that one arrived in 2025 conflates an unrelated article.
Absence is the hardest thing to check
An earlier pass of this research put Oklahoma down as a non-adopting state, because no statute turned up anywhere. The empty search became the finding.
A later pass read the enrolled act, which took effect on November 1, 2024. The absence was in the search. Nothing announces the moment a conclusion drawn from an empty search stops being true, so those conclusions decay in silence. A claim that something exists can be tested against the thing itself.
This site therefore writes an absence as a search result rather than as a fact about the world. TikTok is the clearest case. Its Help Center indexes list no deceased-user article, and its US privacy policy says nothing about death, searched on July 28, 2026.
The Remembering label has a traceable origin. A data miner found it in TikTok’s code in March 2024, and the company has never announced any such feature.
Reddit has no dedicated deceased-user policy that this site could locate, searched on the same date. Self-service deletion does exist. A generic request form exists too, and TikTok’s in-app reporting path comes from third parties rather than from TikTok itself. The smaller platforms page carries both of those findings as absences rather than as settled negatives.
An absence finding is a live claim with a short shelf life, and it ages faster than anything else here. Re-checking one costs a search. Where a platform’s silence matters to an estate, the lawyer handling it can put the question to the company in writing.
What changes fast, and what does not
Claims on this site fall into three groups, sorted by how fast each of them tends to move. That grouping decides what a date is worth.
The statutory framework barely moves. The split between a catalogue of messages and their content has held since the model act was finished in 2015. So have the security principles behind both, and a year-old date costs you nothing there. The second group drifts on a yearly cycle instead.
State adoption status, retention policies, and loyalty terms all sit in that second group—American Airlines has terms effective March 1, 2026. Last year’s version is wrong. A page repeating it isn’t merely stale, and the difference matters when a family acts on the number in it.
The third group changes without any notice at all. Settings paths, feature names, and claims that something doesn’t exist can be right in the morning and wrong by the evening.
A few sources make this worse by carrying no date of their own at all. Google, Apple, and Bitwarden publish policy pages with no last-updated stamp anywhere on them. Support-article numbers drift too, and the Discord article on deceased users has already changed its own. An old link can now point elsewhere.
Retention windows sit in that middle group, and they carry more consequence than the rest. Google’s two-year inactivity clock and Apple’s one-year iCloud clock decide whether anything survives long enough for a family to argue over. Read the company’s page before counting on either.
What this site does not cover
Parts of this subject went unchecked. Yahoo, AOL, and Microsoft consumer email were never verified for this site, and neither were PayPal, Venmo, and Cash App.
Fraud after a death sits inside the topic but outside the research. Credit-bureau death flags, Social Security and IRS notification, and obituary hygiene appear here as a fraud surface. This site offers no verified sequence for handling any of them, because the research behind these pages never covered it. Naming the hole beats papering over it.
Several findings here are hedged on purpose. Apple’s support article says in its indexed version that legacy access lasts three years, and the statically rendered page doesn’t carry that text. The Apple page reports it as indexed-only rather than settled, because the hedge is part of the claim.
Three other claims carry that same label. Instagram’s published list is indexed-only, the US Virgin Islands enactment rests on one source, and Coinbase on restatements rather than its own page.
One gap is structural rather than factual. Software runs the editorial checks behind these pages, and no lawyer has reviewed any of them. The project has no escalation contact configured, so legal questions raised while writing had nowhere to go. Stating that gap plainly beats writing around it.
Every date on this site is the date somebody last looked, which is a weaker claim than most guides make. Check the number before acting on it. Where a decision turns on any claim on this site, the estate lawyer or the probate court is where it gets settled.