What happens to your social media accounts when you die?
Google, Facebook and Apple each let you name someone in advance, and each restricts what that person can do. None of them hands over your password. Where no such setting was made, your family is left negotiating with a company's support process rather than exercising a legal right.
The short answer
Nothing happens automatically. Each platform applies its own terms of service, not Indian succession law, and most accounts are non-transferable under those terms. What your family can do depends almost entirely on whether you configured something before you died.
What each platform actually offers
Google offers Inactive Account Manager, which triggers after a chosen period of inactivity. Facebook offers a Legacy Contact with tightly limited powers. Apple offers a Legacy Contact who uses an access key. All three are opt-in and must be set up while you are alive.
| Platform | Mechanism | Key limitation |
|---|---|---|
| Inactive Account Manager — inactivity window of 3, 6, 12 or 18 months; up to ten recipients; you choose which data each receives | Triggers on inactivity, not on death. A long hospital stay can fire it. | |
| Legacy Contact, or permanent deletion | Cannot log in as you, cannot read your messages, cannot remove friends | |
| Apple | Legacy Contact using a generated access key shared in advance | Access is limited; the key must have been shared before death |
Note what none of them do: hand over your password, or give the recipient the account itself. They grant a constrained, platform-defined form of access — which is a real improvement on nothing, and is not inheritance.
What happens if you set nothing up
Your family must approach each company individually through a bereavement process, supply a death certificate and proof of relationship, and accept whatever that company decides. Outcomes vary by platform and are usually memorialisation or deletion rather than access.
These processes were designed around US and EU legal frameworks. India has no equivalent of the US RUFADAA statutes granting fiduciaries access to digital accounts, so an Indian family is relying on a foreign company’s discretionary policy rather than on an enforceable domestic right. A succession certificate proves entitlement to an Indian court. It does not oblige a platform abroad to act on it.
Accounts nobody thinks about
The accounts that cause the most difficulty are rarely the social ones. They are the email address that receives every password reset, the domain registrar holding a family business’s name, the cloud storage holding the only copy of photographs, and the subscriptions that keep charging a closed card.
Email is the one to solve first. Whoever controls your primary inbox can reset almost everything else — which is exactly why it is both the most useful thing to pass on and the most dangerous thing to leave lying around.
What to do about it
Configure the built-in tools where they exist, because they cost nothing and work without your family needing anything from you. Then keep a separate inventory of what exists, and an access mechanism for the credentials the platforms will not release.
| Step | Effort | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| Set Google Inactive Account Manager | 10 minutes | Gmail, Drive, Photos, YouTube |
| Set Facebook Legacy Contact | 2 minutes | Profile memorialisation only |
| Set Apple Legacy Contact | 5 minutes | iCloud data, with limits |
| Record an inventory of accounts | 1 hour | Everything else — safe to share |
| Arrange credential release | Varies | The accounts no platform tool covers |
Legatus handles the last row: credentials encrypted in your browser, released to nominees only after two of three confirm, an administrator reviews a death certificate, and a 72-hour hold passes.