It starts, more often than not, with a locked phone.
Family convenes in the aftermath of a loss. There are clothes to sort, books to shelve and papers to file away. There’s the strange intimacy of touching things that were handled daily by someone absent so suddenly. And then there’s the phone, that one, resting glass-down on the table, occasionally buzzing with messages no one presumes to open.
The device has years of life. The device contains a trove of information: messages sent and received, photos taken, voice notes recorded, and drafts stored for later elaboration or tomorrow. And it contains passwords no one knows and accounts no one can access. The phone is more than a thing. It is a sealed archive.
This is the legacy no one warned us about.
For the vast majority of human history, death led to a familiar ritual of sorting. Material goods were split, donated, fought over or quietly absorbed into the lives of the survivors. Letters were opened, diaries found, and pictures placed in frames or returned to darkness. What was left was material, bound, and readable.
None of those things are part of our digital lives.
These days, people spend their lives collecting emails, social media profiles, cloud storage, messaging histories, and digital subscriptions. Entire relationships unfold online. Whole selves are cobbled together, revised and updated in servers far from our own. And yet when we die, these personal archives do not simply pass cleanly into the hands of the living. They hover in a liminal space between the private and the obliteration, memory and unknowing.
The question is not if we leave something. It’s about who gets to open them and whether they should be opened at all.
Now, families managing grief are facing a new kind of loss. Photos are trapped behind lost passwords. If the platforms do not unlock accounts, the messages are stuck there. Birthday reminders unexpectedly reappear. The system hardly knows when someone is gone, inflicting algorithmic echoes.
There is something uniquely cruel about being told by someone that a memory of a loved one does actually exist, but that legally it was locked off for them to access.
Currently, the laws regarding digital inheritance are disorganised and inconsistent. In most places, digital assets are not considered tangible property. One may possess a laptop but not the data on a platform. Terms of service often supersede wills. Laws that are meant to protect the living extend beyond death — and leave families in limbo. Even when intentions are stating the obvious, access is not ensured.
Emotionally, the ground becomes murkier still.
Digital shards for some are a lifeline. Old messages offer comfort. A voice note captures tone and presence. The social media page becomes a publicly held space for remembering where grief is shared and the hardship of memory is softened. For others, the endurance of digital traces seems invasive. This serves to remind us that recovery is blocked by software without the understanding of when it’s finished.
There is no one-size-fits-all way to grieve a data trail.
“This is exactly what makes digital inheritance so challenging. We aren’t used to facing these questions in our culture. Where does an email archive fall in the spectrum from single, with the least privacy and most inseparability, to group, combining the highest privacy and greatest separateness? Who has a claim to a photograph after the one pictured has passed away? Is access the same as betrayal or care? What does an erasure, or perhaps an act of mercy, look like in a digital footprint?
We want to believe death is the end. Digital life resists that narrative.
Platforms are built for continuity, not closure. Such design can only work if user accounts are forever. Profiles are still technically international unless you take actions to intentionally make them international or erase them. Algorithms keep throwing up memories, making connections and calling for comment. The deceased are treated as dormant users, not missing people.
In this regard, digital inheritance is indicative of a deeper incongruence between human life and engineering logic. We are finite. Our platforms are not.
And there’s an inconvenient truth to the fact that we have no desire to prepare for this. It’s this notion of a digital inheritance that makes us confront how much of ourselves we’ve been storing outside our bodies. Screens more and more intervene in our jokes, arguments, flirtations, anxieties and affections. Constructing their afterlife is a way of recognising their greatness.
It may also be why most people never have the conversation at all.
We draft wills for homes and heirlooms, not for inboxes — we plan funerals, not file transfers. We’re fine talking about what we want done with our bodies, but we’re not having conversations about where we’d like our data to go. The upshot: a silent burden transferred to those who are already bereaved.
What if we took our digital property as seriously as we do our physical stuff?
It doesn’t mean that you have to obsessively archive every account or reveal every private thought. It involves intention. The decisions are about what to retain, what to share and what should go away. These conversations need to be able to say y’all have feelings and also y’all are not entitled to people. These are words on ginger that privacy doesn’t necessarily die with us, and neither does relational obligation.
Some of these platforms are beginning to act. Legacy contacts, memorial profiles, and data download options are signs of a more humane approach. But these vitally important tools are underused and frequently discovered too late. Responsibility remains almost entirely with individuals who are discouraged from thinking this way.
So the digital inheritance is left accidental, not designed.
There is a quiet moral question at the heart of all this. It is not a technological problem; it is a care problem. Abandoning a digital life without guidance is no moral failing. It is a cultural gap. The underlying gulf in culture — we have not even seen it yet.
But cultures change when questions can no longer be ignored.
With generations who have spent full adult lives online growing older, the number of unresolved digital legacies will only increase. What is considered an edge case today will soon become the norm. This same locked phone will be the erstwhile symbol of modern grief. The humane thing to do is to choose transparency, erasure, or something in between. We get to decide what parts of ourselves we save and how. It’s our right not to put our loved ones through the double mourning of a dead person and an operating company.
Digital inheritance is not about the data. It is about dignity.
Someone could even hold your phone in their hands, look at your pictures, or wait a moment before pressing “delete.” That which they find should not be a mere accident of indifference but a consequence of care.
It’s not a question of whether our digital lives will outlast us. They already do.
The question is, are we prepared to be held accountable, if not for what we do, then at least for what we make of the place?