A house, an email, photos in the cloud and a seed phrase in a drawer are not interchangeable items from the point of view of inheritance. A notary can transfer a flat, but cannot technically transfer a password. The law can include a right in the estate, while a platform contract binds the account to a particular person. The GDPR does not itself apply to the data of the deceased, and without a key, a custodian or a legal title what remains of the cloud may be only a request to support.
What we know: Section 1475 of the Civil Code defines the estate as the entire property of the deceased, and Recital 27 GDPR leaves rules for the data of the deceased to the Member States.[1][2] Google, Apple, Meta and Microsoft at the same time publish their own procedures for inactive or deceased users; we checked their status as of 31 August 2026.[4][5][6][7][21]
What we do not know: This article is not a complete survey of all Czech court decisions, nor legal advice for a particular estate. It cannot be guaranteed in advance that a Czech resolution will open a foreign account, that a written wish will overcome contractual terms or the rights of third persons, or that today’s platform procedure will remain unchanged. For property, disputes or sensitive communication, verification with a notary or a lawyer and in the service’s current help pages is appropriate.
1. A cloud the notary does not see
Picture probate proceedings in a district town. The notary wants to list the estate: a flat, a car, an account at a Czech bank, a share in a firm. The son asks for access to his father’s Google account, because the tax documents and ten years of family photographs are there. The daughter wants Facebook frozen as a memorial and WhatsApp left alone. The family’s lawyer cites the Civil Code and says that the estate comprises the entire property. The platform’s lawyer, who is not in the room and answers only from a support form, replies that the account is bound to a person, that private messages of third persons cannot be released and that without a custodian set in advance the data will after a time be deleted. The custodian of the cryptocurrency wallet, who is also not in the room, does not exist. There is only a seed phrase that the father told no one.
At first glance this is a dispute about the decency of firms. In fact each person is describing a different object. The notary measures property rights that can be valued and recorded. The son measures practical access to a file. The daughter measures piety. The lawyer measures the Czech norm. The platform measures a contractual term, encryption and the American stored-communications statute. Cryptocurrency measures possession of a key.
The family, the notary and the platform can thus each be solving a different part of the same problem. A death certificate that is enough for some property steps need not open a communications account. “Digital inheritance” is therefore only a shared name for different claims and obstacles: money, a licence, a memory, someone else’s secret, an encryption key and the rules for an inactive account.
First it is therefore necessary to name what is actually to be handed on. A house, a personal licence, a letter from a third person and a safe without a combination are subject to different rules; there is no one universal procedure for them.
An account is not a thing. A licence is not ownership. And a notarial resolution is not a password to the cloud.
— Jiný Kontext
2. What altogether makes up a digital estate
When it is said that after a person “data remained”, it is easy to form the impression that there is one box and one key. The result, however, arises in a chain. Each layer can give the heir something, take something away, or change the kind of loss. Two accounts with the same provider therefore need not end the same way. The same person may have a personal Gmail, a work Workspace and a telephone to which verification SMS messages arrive — and each of these trails lives in a different regime.
Five layers of one digital estate
- Economic property: balances, claims, domains, monetised channels, tokens, codes for restoring a wallet.
- Licensed content: e-books, films, games, cloud subscriptions. The user often did not buy a thing, but a non-exclusive right to use an account.
- Personal archives: photographs, documents, unfinished texts, phone backups.
- Confidential communication: emails, chats, voice messages — including third persons who spoke with the deceased.
- Identity and administration: login, second factor, an estate contact, the contractual regime, the seat of the provider, the deletion period.
The basic account determines an important part of the trail, but it is not the only actor. An application can encrypt data so that even the operator cannot read them. A company administrator can after an employee’s death close the account before the family manages to ask. The same photo can lie in iCloud, in Google Photos and on an SD card. The same message can be on a device, in a backup and in a service that may remove the account or the data after its published period of inactivity. The precise period depends on the service, the type of account and the current terms.
This is precisely where the first error of public debate arises. A headline announces a contest of heirs with a corporation, but in fact it compares two entirely different things: a right to an estate and the ability to open a box. Or, conversely, it adds photos, chats and bitcoins into one “digital property” and expects one procedure. An honest comparison must state not only the service, but also the type of account, whether a custodian was set, whether data exist outside the cloud, whether it is someone else’s communication and whether a person holds the key, or only an algorithm.
This is not a dispute about a password. The cut of the layers determines where to turn in a loss. If photos disappeared, the inactivity manager may have failed. If bitcoin disappeared, a paper with a seed phrase may have failed. If the platform refused a chat, a statute on the secrecy of messages may have held. The sentence “the firm will give us nothing” is the start of a diagnosis, not its end.
3. An estate is not the same as access to an account
Czech inheritance law works with the transfer of property. Digital services work with the identity of the user. These two logics meet only sometimes.
Property can be valued, listed and transferred. Access is a technical state: you know the password, you have the telephone, you can confirm an SMS, the platform recognises you as the designated custodian. One can inherit a claim against a bank and at the same time not have the password to internet banking — the bank, however, has a statutory duty to deal with the heirs. Conversely one can know the password to Instagram and still not have the right to go on using the account, because the terms forbid it and logging in as the dead person is a breach of contract.
The difference is sharper for things that nobody “holds” apart from the key. Bitcoin continues to exist on the network. Without a seed phrase it is, however, economically dead in the same way as a safe whose combination nobody knows. The law is not enough here, because there is no one to sue for the release of the content. The network has no notary.
The difference is still sharper for communication. An heir may have a legitimate interest in finding an invoice in an email. The same email contains letters of people who spoke with the deceased in the trust that the addressee, not his son, would read them. A platform that refuses to release an entire mailbox need not merely be stubborn. It may be protecting third persons. It may also be covering its own operational convenience. Both things can look the same. They are not the same.
That is why the sentence “data are inherited” is a dangerous shortcut. Some data behave like a thing. Some like a loan. Some like someone else’s letter. Some like a lock for which the key exists only once. Without this distinction the family asks for everything and the platform refuses everything. Both sides then have the feeling that the other is lying.
A notarial resolution is in this dispute a strong paper only where there is an addressee with a duty to perform: a bank, the land registry, a debtor. With a platform that regards itself as a guardian of someone else’s communication, the same resolution is only an attachment to a form. It may be enough for deactivation. It need not be enough for an export. The difference is not recognised from the stamp. It is recognised from the help pages that the deceased did not read in life.
4. Purchased content may be only a personal licence
The market in digital content speaks the language of purchase. A button may say “buy a book”, “buy a film” or “buy an album”, but it does not itself say whether the entitlement is transferable to an heir. That must be verified in the current terms of the particular service.
A user may have an entitlement to read, listen to or download the content without obtaining transferable ownership comparable to a book on a shelf. For a particular e-book or film the result therefore cannot be determined without the contractual terms, the manner of acquisition and any copy outside the account.
Copyright law regulates the transfer of the author’s economic rights to heirs.[15] That does not, however, by itself show that a consumer’s licence to a work purchased in a catalogue is transferred in the same way. These are two different legal situations and the second must be assessed according to the particular contract.
The same map misleads for a subscription. A family can pay for months for a cloud that nobody will open any more, because the payment card lives longer than the user. Or, conversely, it loses a terabyte of photographs because the subscription falls and the storage empties after a period. The price list here measures access in life. It does not measure what happens when access disappears.
An honest reading of a licence therefore requires four figures without which “purchase” is only an advertising word: whether it is a thing or an entitlement; whether the entitlement is bound to a person; whether a copy exists outside the account; whether the provider has a procedure for heirs, or only for deletion.
5. The Czech code sees property. It does not see a password
The Czech Civil Code in Section 1475 proceeds from the principle that the estate comprises the entire property of the deceased — the aggregate of their property rights and duties. The exception is rights and duties bound exclusively to the person, unless they were recognised as a debt or asserted in life.[1]
This sentence will carry a flat, a car and a claim. It carries less well an account that according to the terms “is not transferable”, and still less well a password that nobody wrote down. In the cited Czech sources we did not find a special institute of a digital will that would by itself bind a foreign platform to release content against its terms. That is not, however, a claim that such a result cannot be brought by a particular contract, court decision or other legal title.[3][18]
Personality protection does not, moreover, disappear entirely with death. Under Section 82, close persons may defend the human dignity of the deceased.[1] That is a tool against misuse of a name, likeness, reputation. It is not an automatic key to Gmail. It can more readily prevent a profile from becoming a stage than compel a profile to become an archive.
The cited Czech legal commentaries distinguish property digital assets, the accounts themselves and practical access to data. The result depends on the nature of the right, the provider’s terms and whether the data exist in a form that can be released.[3][18] A cryptocurrency asset can be part of the estate and still remain inaccessible without a private key. An email can contain property documents and still remain closed because of other people’s messages.
The code is therefore not powerless over everything. It is blind where the subject of the estate is not in the land registry, in a bank or in a safe, but in the relation between a login, a cipher and a foreign contract. The blindness is not recognised at the notary. It is recognised three months later, when support answers with a template.
6. The GDPR protects the living. The dead it leaves to the states
Many people mistakenly believe that their digital privacy after death is protected by the European GDPR regulation. The text of the regulation is more sober.
Recital 27 provides that the regulation does not apply to the personal data of deceased persons and that Member States may lay down rules for the processing of such data.[2] That does not mean that the data of the dead are freely available. It means that Union protection of personal data as subject rights ends with death. The further regime depends on national law, on the contract with the provider and on the rights of people whose data remain in the account — addressees, senders, people in photographs.
According to the cited sources Czechia has no special statutory regime of a digital will comparable to the French post-mortem directives; what applies in particular are general inheritance law, personality protection, the contract and the rules of the service.[1][3][18] France, in the Informatique et Libertés act, allows a person in life to determine directives on the retention, erasure and communication of data after death; the supervisory authority CNIL explains this regime publicly.[14][22] The difference is not that the French “have the GDPR even after death”. It is a special national arrangement following on from the space that Recital 27 leaves to the Member States.
Caution is needed in the opposite direction as well. The absence of the GDPR for the dead does not entitle heirs to ask for everything. In the account live the data of the living. A message that a colleague sent is their communication. A photograph on which a neighbour appears is also their likeness. A provider that refuses a blanket release of a mailbox may rely precisely on these third persons. It may also rely on its own term. The first reason is legal. The second is contractual. Without distinguishing both, the impression arises that “Europe does not protect the data of the dead, therefore it must release them”. Recital 27 did not carry such a sentence.
7. An American wall in front of a Czech resolution
A number of large platforms are seated in the United States and apply the federal Stored Communications Act to the content of communication. The act limits when a provider may release the content of a mailbox to someone other than the user.[12] A Czech resolution on an estate is in this text not an automatic consent of the user. An American court and a provider need not read from it an authorisation for a full release of emails.
Microsoft, for personal accounts, distinguishes two situations. A user can in advance set OneDrive Digital Legacy: a trusted contact, after verification by a code, a request and a waiting period, obtains read-only access to files on OneDrive.[21] If this tool was not set, Microsoft in its procedure for deceased users describes a formal legal path and does not expressly guarantee the release of content. It also points to the life cycle of inactive accounts.[7] The particular result therefore depends on the prior setting, the type of data and the legal regime.
X (formerly Twitter) is still narrower. The official procedure contemplates a request to deactivate a deceased person’s account. Access to the account, the password or an archive of private messages the firm, according to its help pages, does not provide regardless of kinship.[8] The family can therefore let the account disappear. It cannot inherit it as a diary.
This wall is not proof that Czech law “does not apply”. It is proof that enforceability runs into a foreign statute, the seat of the defendant and the price of an international dispute. For a mid-sized estate a lawsuit in California is often more expensive than the value of the photographs the family is looking for. The platform knows this. The family finds it out late.
American states are in the meantime trying to build a bridge from the other side. The model Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act gives fiduciaries — estate administrators — a framework for access to digital assets, if the state has adopted it.[17] Even that, however, does not automatically open an encrypted chat or erase a conflict with the federal communications statute. It is a map of domestic fiduciary law. It is not a key to a Czech Gmail.
8. Germany inherits the account. France gives directives
The comparison shows that the same European Recital 27 does not lead to the same result.
The German Federal Court of Justice on 12 July 2018 decided in case III ZR 183/17 that a contract for a user account on a social network passes to the heirs by way of universal succession under Section 1922 BGB. The heirs have a claim to access to the account including the communications content. Telecommunications secrecy, post-mortem personality rights and data protection did not, according to the court, bar this access. A provision on a “memorial state” that in fact made access impossible the court did not recognise as an effective obstacle to inheritance.[13] The analogy was sober: digital letters are not to be inherited differently from paper ones.
France took another path. The law for a digital republic and Article 85 of the Informatique et Libertés act allow a person in life to determine what is to happen with their data after death: retain, delete, communicate, appoint an executor. If there is no directive, heirs have more limited entitlements to acts needed for the settlement of the estate and for the protection of memory.[14][22] The state here does not build an automatic claim to the whole of Facebook. It builds an instruction given in advance.
In the cited Czech sources we did not find an equally unambiguous precedent of the BGH type, nor a special regime of French post-mortem directives. That is not proof that no relevant Czech decision exists; a complete case-law survey exceeds this article. For the practical result, therefore, besides the general code, much depends on what the user set in life and what the platform currently allows.
An international comparison is not a ranking of civilisation. It is proof that Recital 27 is a beginning, not an end. Whoever reads from it that “in Europe the dead have no data” reads wrongly. Whoever reads from it that a Czech resolution will open iCloud reads equally wrongly.
9. Platform rules determine the practical procedure
The operating rules of a service often decide what practical procedure a bereaved person will have available. Tools exist, but they must be set in advance and their possibilities are not identical with inheritance law.
| Platform | Tool in life | What an heir usually obtains | What they usually do not obtain |
|---|---|---|---|
| Inactive Account Manager: inactivity of 3, 6, 12 or 18 months, up to 10 contacts | Data that the user selected in advance | What they did not order to be shared; the account can after long inactivity disappear even without a plan[4] | |
| Apple | Legacy Contact and an access key | Available account data after presentation of the key and a death certificate | Keychain data and licensed media; without an access key the result depends on another legal procedure[5] |
| Meta | A designated person / memorialisation | Administration of a memorial, sometimes deletion | Private messages. A memorialised account is a pious state, not a mailbox[6] |
| Microsoft | OneDrive Digital Legacy with a trusted contact designated in advance | After a code, a request and a waiting period, read-only access to files on OneDrive | Outlook, passwords and other services; without a prior setting the release of content is not guaranteed[7][21] |
| X | Nothing | Deactivation after verification | Access, an archive, private messages[8] |
The key problem is not that the tools would not exist. It is that they must be switched on in advance. Google describes a plan for the event of inactivity and at the same time a separate policy for long-term inactive personal accounts.[4] Apple requires a Legacy Contact access key and a death certificate; the tool will not, for example, make Keychain data available.[5] Microsoft offers a trusted contact limited access to OneDrive.[21] Meta and X have their own, narrower procedures.[6][8]
Two similar accounts can have a different regime
The same person often has a personal Gmail, a work Workspace and an account on a telephone that the firm manages through MDM. A private photo gallery and a work drive are not the same legal subject. A pilot of “what happens after death” must therefore record in which profile it is being tested, who is the administrator of the domain and whether the terms are consumer or enterprise. Otherwise the family tests the help pages for a natural person and by mistake presents them as the regime of an employee account that the IT department will switch off within a week.
The practical result is therefore determined not only by the logo of the service, but also by the type of account, its configuration and the current terms.
10. Four kinds of failure that an account can hide
A demand that a system “hand data to the family” is too broad. For each item it is necessary to assess whether the loss can be detected in time, remedied and what impact it has. A deleted public post, the only export of a wedding, a lost private key and an unauthorisedly released conversation of someone else represent four different kinds of harm.
| Type of failure | What it looks like | How to test it in life | What limits the harm |
|---|---|---|---|
| Loss of access | A password, an SMS code, a blocked telephone | Try restoration without a SIM and without the second factor | An inactivity manager, emergency access in a password manager, a local backup |
| Loss of a licence | “Purchased” content cannot be transferred | Read whether it is a licence bound to a person | A copy where the law allows it; do not rely on the shop catalogue |
| Loss of a key | A wallet without a seed phrase | Practise the procedure only with an empty test wallet; restore a production seed only by a verified procedure on trusted hardware or an offline device | Separate storage of the phrase, not in the same cloud |
| Interference with other people’s messages | An heir reads letters of third persons | Separate documents from conversation already in the archive | An express instruction as to what to release and what to delete |
Alongside the possibilities of the platform, what decides is whether the family knows about the account at all, whether data can be exported before the period expires and whether the loss will strike family memory, legal evidence, or irreversible capital.
A service with a clearly set contact and a local backup can be more usable for a family than a comfortable cloud without a recovery plan. What decides is whether the bereaved know about the account, understand the official procedure and can react before the currently valid inactivity period.
11. 2FA protects the account; an estate needs recovery
Two-factor authentication is an important protection of an account and because of an estate it should not be switched off or weakened. The risk arises when there is no safe and previously tested way of recovery. A bereaved person may know the password, but may not have the original telephone, SIM, backup code or authority to take over the account.
End-to-end encryption in messengers means that the operator cannot read the content of personal messages. WhatsApp states this expressly; with an optionally end-to-end encrypted backup it moreover cannot restore a lost password or a 64-digit key.[20] Apple, for Legacy Contact, does not make data stored in Keychain available.[5] This is a property of privacy protection that at the same time limits the possibilities of recovery.
Cryptocurrencies are a pure form of the same problem. The network does not know the deceased. What is known is only an address and a signature. Whoever holds the key holds the property. Whoever does not hold it has no one to ask for an exception. A notary can here record that “a wallet” was part of the estate. They cannot compel the blockchain to change the mathematics. A right to a thing and possession of a key diverge here more sharply than with a flat. A flat can be opened by a locksmith with a court order. An address on the network a locksmith will not open.
Backup codes stored only in a telephone that itself holds the second factor are not independent recovery. The same applies to a seed phrase stored only in an account whose Keychain Legacy Contact will not open. A safe plan therefore separates active login credentials, backup codes and an instruction for the authorised person.
Recovery can in life be safely tried on a clean device without the original SIM, but only within the bounds of the service’s terms and without sharing active passwords or private keys. For cryptocurrencies it is safer to verify the procedure on an empty test wallet; a production seed should not be entered into someone else’s device or made available to another person during the trial. An unsuccessful test is a signal to adjust the plan, not a reason to weaken 2FA.
12. A private message is not a family album
Family photographs and tax documents are one kind of trail. A chat with a doctor, a lover, a debtor or a friend from military service is another. The first can reasonably be wanted as part of family memory and of proof. The second is correspondence in which the sender need not have counted on an heir reading it.
The German BGH accepted the analogy with paper letters and in the given matter decided on the heirs’ access to the account including communication.[13] Meta and X, in their estate procedures, do not make private messages available.[6][8] For a Czech case the result cannot be derived only from these three examples; it depends on the law, the contract, the kind of data and the particular procedure of the service.
An instruction in life can make the family’s wishes clear: an archive of photographs and documents can be backed up and its custodian determined, while for conversations it can be recorded whether the person wishes their retention or erasure. Such an instruction does not, however, by itself transfer other people’s rights, replace the consent of further participants in the communication or necessarily overcome the terms of the service.
The secrecy of electronic communications in the Czech Electronic Communications Act protects the confidentiality of communication.[19] It does not itself determine whether and in what scope an heir is to obtain a cloud archive. A written wish can help the bereaved, but the final procedure must respect the law, the contractual terms and the privacy of other people.
The separation of albums and conversations can be done cheaply in life: an export of photographs to a disk, a folder of documents, an express ban on reading chat. After death the same separation is expensive or impossible, because the platform sees one account. The notary sees one estate. Neither sees the layers.
13. Necrobots: a memory that starts to answer
With generative AI the question of the trail shifts from access to an account to use of the trail. From preserved emails, chats and recordings a system can be built that answers in the style of the deceased. The literature on the so-called digital afterlife and on deathbots notes a double pressure: the dignity of the dead as an informational body and the vulnerability of mourners, who may mistake a simulation for a continuation of the relationship.[11][16]
Öhman and Floridi propose that digital remains not be taken only as capital to be mined. They propose an analogy with human remains in collections: dignity bars their being a mere means of profit.[11] That is not a legal claim in a Czech judicial senate. It is a warning that a consent that can no longer be given cannot be replaced by the fact that the data “technically remained”.
The question is therefore not only whether a chatbot helps in grief. It is who may build the model, from what data, with what ban on commerce and with what right of close persons to switch the model off. Section 82 of the Civil Code gives close persons a tool to defend the dignity of the deceased.[1] It does not say whether a simulation of a voice is an interference. It says that the dispute will be conducted over piety, not over the GDPR. The GDPR is silent for the dead.[2]
A written instruction can document whether a person wished, or did not wish, posthumous use of voice and texts. It is not, however, an automatic guarantee of enforceability: the maker of the system must, besides the wish of the deceased, deal with the rights of living persons, copyright, contracts and possible personality protection.
With a simulation of the deceased the dispute does not concern only access to data, but also piety, consent and the possibility of switching the system off. Recital 27 GDPR does not itself resolve this situation.[2] From the cited sources a comprehensive Czech regime of posthumous avatars cannot be inferred; a particular case would require a separate legal assessment, among other things according to personality protection and the rights of living persons.
14. Two brothers, the same father, the opposite lock
The deceased: a father died suddenly. For ten years he documented the life of the family exclusively by telephone. He stored photographs in a cloud with two-factor authentication on a number that after death the operator blocked. Tax PDFs lay in the same account. A bitcoin wallet had a seed phrase in a phone note, not on paper. Facebook had no designated person. Google Inactive Account Manager was not switched on.
Brother A knows the password to the email. He does not know the code from the SMS. Password recovery therefore gives him nothing. A login from a new telephone asks for the second factor, which lies in a dead device.
Brother B asks the support of the individual services and attaches a Czech death certificate and a resolution on the estate. The result cannot be determined in advance in one sentence: Microsoft without Digital Legacy set describes a formal legal procedure and does not guarantee release, Facebook offers memorialisation without access to private messages, and for a cryptocurrency without a recovery phrase there is no central operator who would replace the key.[6][7][12]
The result is not a dramatic exception. It is the sum of unset layers. Thousands of photographs and video recordings can disappear after the deletion of an inactive account. Tax documents remain in limbo until the family obtains them from the senders. Bitcoin remains at an address that everyone can see and no one can sign.
The two brothers are not, moreover, conducting a dispute about love for their father. They are conducting a dispute about which object they want to open. One wants an album. The other wants a wallet. The platform will open neither, because the father did not open the settings that serve for that. The notary can record that “digital property” was part of the estate. She cannot carry it out of a data centre.
15. What to set before the account falls silent
A reasonable preparation does not begin with a list of passwords in a drawer. It begins with a map of the layers and a decision as to which layer is to be handed on, which deleted and which remain unreadable. Passwords in an unsecured file are moreover a risk in life. A password manager with emergency access is something else: the designated person obtains access after a set period, not at once.
| Need | First step | Decisive test | Unacceptable shortcut |
|---|---|---|---|
| Family photos and documents | A local backup plus a cloud custodian | Recovery on someone else’s computer without your SIM | “It is in iCloud, they will somehow give it” |
| A Google / Apple account | Inactive Account Manager, Legacy Contact, a safely stored access key | The contact knows where the key is and understands the official procedure | Only a death certificate without a prior setting |
| Social networks | A designated person, or an express order to delete | The family knows your choice of piety / erasure | The assumption that Facebook “will do it decently” |
| Cryptocurrencies and 2FA | Separately and safely stored recovery data | A procedure verified on a test account or an empty wallet | A production seed in the telephone that holds 2FA |
| Licences and subscriptions | A list of what will lapse, the card that goes on paying | Cancellation of payments, export where possible | The myth that a “purchase” is inherited like a book |
| An AI simulation of a voice | A written ban, or written consent | Close persons know what they must not upload into a model | Silence and a later dispute about piety |
For Czech use a separate language test is necessary. A death certificate from the registry office is not a “court order” from Microsoft’s help pages. An Apple “Legacy Contact” is not the same as an heir under the code. “Memorialisation” is not an archive. The test set should include diacritics in names, Czech documents, a work versus a personal account and the sentence “the source is not enough”, if the help pages promise only deletion.
What needs to be set
The first examination concerns the existence of accounts. A family cannot ask for what it does not know about. The second concerns destination: who is the contact, whether they have the key, whether they know that they are it. The third concerns a copy outside a single cloud. The fourth concerns money that has value only with a key. The fifth concerns what, conversely, should not be released. Without the fifth layer, “open everything” is as crude as “delete everything”.
Some households ultimately need several regimes. One archive for children, a second ban for social networks, a third safe for keys. That is not a failure of simplicity. It is the same decision as having a different key to the flat and a different one to the safe. The condition is that the division be intelligible and that a single fire, a single SIM and a single cloud not decide everything at once.
16. A test that says more than a death certificate
Preparation can be done without a lawyer in California and without the illusion that “it will somehow work out”. A short, disciplined attempt is enough. Its aim is not to prove that platforms are evil. The aim is to find places where access will fail, while the failure can still be repaired.
Fourteen days from impression to a plan
- Days 1–2: Write down services, devices, wallets, subscriptions and what is only in one cloud.
- Days 3–4: Separate property, licences, archives, other people’s messages and keys.
- Days 5–7: Switch on the native tools of Google, Apple, Meta or Microsoft according to the service used. Store access and recovery data separately and safely.
- Days 8–10: Verify the recovery procedure on a test account or an empty wallet; do not enter a production seed or an active password into someone else’s device.
- Days 11–12: Store the list with a notary or in a safe. Bare passwords in open text do not belong in the list unless the safe protects them.
- Day 13: Write down what is to be deleted, what memorialised and what must not enter an AI model.
- Day 14: Tell the designated person that the task belongs to them, and set a date for the next review.
Three tests of whether an heir will actually get the data
The first is identitary: will the platform recognise the designated person without your SIM? The second is of content: will they get an album, or only the possibility of administering or deleting the account? The third is of time: will the procedure finish before the currently valid inactivity period of the given service? Periods differ by platform and type of account, therefore they should not be replaced by one universal number.
The test should verify whether an independent path of recovery exists, not circumvent the second factor. A trial on a test account without the original telephone will show whether backup codes are safely available and whether the designated person understands the official procedure of the service.
The last output is not a list of passwords on a slip. It is an operating rule: which trails are handed on, which are deleted, who bears the key, what is pious and what is evidence in a tax proceeding. Accounts, tariffs and help pages change. Without a date of revision even a good plan turns into a family superstition.
17. Photographs and legal supporting documents can both be lost
In online accounts today there lie not only memories, but also invoices, contracts, school correspondence, health attachments and data needed for access to property. The loss of an account can therefore strike a family archive and practical proof.
Platforms therefore determine not only comfort in life, but also the place where important supporting documents may remain after death. A family can, alongside an album, lose a document for a tax proceeding, a bill for a house or a digital asset. The scale of the topic is shown by CZSO data: in 2025, 7.7 million people aged over 16 used the internet, that is 88 % of this population, and 90 % of households were connected to the network; among senior households it was 60 %.[9] From these numbers, however, it cannot be established how many people actually have an estate contact set or a safe recovery plan.
A cloud can keep data that would disappear on a single device. Important documents, however, need a portable backup, a designated authorised person, safely separated recovery data and a clear wish concerning private communication.
A safe plan does not automatically hand over the entire account, nor does it delete everything. It separates property, a family archive, licensed content, other people’s communication and access keys and for each part respects the law and the current procedure of the service.
At the moment when only a holiday lies in the cloud, we are choosing an album. At the moment when documents, keys and ten years of other people’s messages lie there, we are choosing a structure of accountability. And then the question is no longer: “Will the family inherit our account?”
Let us ask: Which trails do we want to hand on, which to delete, who may obtain access to them — and whether for this choice there exists a safe and legally usable procedure?
— Jiný Kontext