Facebook, Google, and Apple each let you name someone in advance, and that choice can sit above a will. Nobody can set one for you later.
The order comes from the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act, or RUFADAA, a model law finished in 2015. It ranks three sources of instruction. A direction you set in a platform’s own tool comes ahead of a will, as long as the tool stays changeable. The will governs next, then the terms of service, and the act’s defaults fill whatever is left.
As of July 28, 2026, 47 states plus the District of Columbia have enacted a version of the act. Louisiana and Massachusetts haven’t enacted it. Delaware keeps an older 2014-generation law instead, so the ranking above doesn’t describe every state.
Deletion follows some of these settings. Anyone acting after a death should save the photos and files before changing anything.
None of the three hands over a password, and Google states plainly that it cannot provide login details. X refuses account access to anyone. Apple supplies a separate legacy account rather than the original one, which is the shape most of these tools take. So a legacy setting decides who gets a copy and what they can change, and never who gets to log in.
No pre-death tool turned up at Instagram, X, TikTok, Snapchat, or Reddit, so Facebook, Google, and Apple are the list. Each grants a narrow set of powers. Which one carries weight against a given will is a question for the lawyer handling the estate.
Facebook’s legacy contact can pin a post and nothing more
A legacy contact on Facebook can pin a post, change the profile photo, and request removal of the account. Reading the messages is off the table.
An archive download works if you switched it on ahead of time, and the setting can’t be added after a death. A deletion election is the other setting you can leave behind. Meta sets out the legacy contact rules in full. Anyone can request memorialization with an obituary or a death certificate, which is a lower bar than estate authority.
A study published at a peer-reviewed conference in 2016, co-written by Facebook staff, found two ways the setting fails. The chosen contact isn’t told automatically. Your named contact can sit there for years with nobody living aware of it.
The second failure cuts the other way. Memorialization removes account access, and anyone’s report can trigger it, so family members holding the password lose the account.
Meta frames the freeze as protection against attempted logins and fraudulent activity, which is a reasonable aim with a hard edge. The account persists until somebody reports it. Meta’s terms bar sharing a password or handing an account to another person, so the password route was never allowed. Instagram offers the same freeze and a removal path, but nothing to set in advance, and a frozen profile can’t be changed.
Deleting an Instagram account takes a birth certificate, a death certificate, and proof of authority, according to search-indexed copies of Meta’s page. Freezing it takes proof of death. Whether a given document satisfies Meta is a call the estate’s lawyer makes, since the platform reads the papers itself.
Google’s tool starts when an account goes quiet
Google’s Inactive Account Manager sends up to 10 people a download link after a silence you set yourself. No death certificate enters into it.
Google explains the setup and timer options on its help site. A quiet account is what drives it. Facebook and Apple wait for somebody to act, but Google’s clock doesn’t, and it starts as soon as the account goes quiet. A survivor can’t shorten that wait, so the people you named get the link on the schedule you chose.
The warnings that start the process go to the account itself and to whatever recovery address it lists. That address can belong to the same person. Every notice then lands in a mailbox nobody opens, and no living person hears anything at all.
The clock keeps running underneath. Google removes an account after two years without a sign-in, which is the outside limit on any of this.
If you never set the tool up, Google runs a separate request process for the account of a person who has died. It offers closure, funds, or data. That route asks for a government ID and a death certificate, and it ends with a copy rather than a login. Message contents sit behind a further gate, because Google asks for a United States court order before releasing them.
Whether an estate can get such an order, and on what showing, is work for the lawyer handling the probate. Setting it up while you’re alive avoids that. The people you name get a download link without proving anything, which is why so much turns on doing it early.
Apple hands nothing over without the access key
Apple pairs a Legacy Contact with an access key generated at setup, and the contact adds a death certificate later. Neither half works on its own.
Apple’s Platform Security guide describes the contact holding the decryption key while Apple stores only a sealed packet. Apple can’t waive that requirement. Losing the key ends the route—no support call and no death certificate can decrypt the packet without it. Apple documents the Legacy Contact setup on its support site.
The legacy account leaves out purchased media and iCloud Keychain, so films, books, and stored passwords stay behind. Payment details and passkeys stay behind too. The legacy key can’t decrypt any of that, which puts the rest of the digital estate out of reach.
Apple’s terms run in the other direction. The iCloud terms carry a clause headed No Right of Survivorship and allow deletion once a death certificate arrives.
Apple’s terms also allow an end on notice, alongside a one-year inactivity clock and a 30-day recovery window. Naming a contact changes that default. Without one, the terms describe deletion on receipt of a death certificate as the ordinary outcome. Whether those terms bind a given estate is a question for its lawyer, since contract and state law can pull apart.
Search-indexed copies of Apple’s support article mention a three-year limit on legacy access, counted from approval of the first request. Popular Science quoted it in June 2025. The text is absent from the rendered page and the security guide, so treat it as indexed-only rather than settled.
Whether a setting should outrank a will is contested
Financial-planning commentator Michael Kitces describes each platform legacy setting as a small testamentary instrument that people execute casually. Almost nobody keeps a list of them.
On his reading, a setting clicked through in a menu ends up overriding a will that somebody drafted on purpose. The Uniform Law Commission sees it differently. Its design rationale treats the online-tool direction as the user’s most recent and most specific expression of intent. Both readings sit on the public record, and this page reports them without picking one.
The ranking holds where the tool can be changed at any time, which is the condition written into the act. Your state may read that differently. How a given setting and a given will interact is the question an estate lawyer is there to answer.
Louisiana and Massachusetts sit outside all of this. Neither has enacted either act, and Louisiana’s widely cited statute number comes from a bill that died in 2016.
Massachusetts had bills numbered H.4639 and S.1110 pending in early 2026, and neither had become law by July 28, 2026. California enacted in 2016. It extended the law to conservators and agents effective January 1, 2025, and sources saying otherwise repeat a 2017 map error. Delaware kept a broader 2014-generation act instead of adopting the newer model, which changes the ranking there.
Write down which of the three settings you’ve set, where the Apple access key sits, and who the named people are. Keep that note out of the will. The rest of the planning steps sit on the plan ahead page, including where that note belongs.