It’s not something anyone really wants to think about, but what happens to those thousands of digital photos on your phone in the event of your passing? Few of us can even be bothered to back up our photos, much less secure their posthumous legacy. But the idea of “personal effects” has changed over the years from physical items you wear or carry around to an entire digital past and present sitting on your smartphone. In fact, 75 percent of Gen Zers are already thinking about it.
Instead of someone claiming ownership over grandma’s couch-cushion-sized photo album charting the family’s history all the way back to the Great Depression, we now have terabytes of group photos, lunch portraits, and selfies that your family may want to keep and treasure. And like anything involving end-of-life preparation, it requires a plan.
A lot of platforms and service providers like Apple, Google, and Facebook do allow you to add what’s known as a “Legacy Contact.” Once activated, these functions generate an access key that can be shared with your chosen contact or contacts. To request access, they will need to provide the access key and upload a copy of your death certificate. Your legacy contact also doesn’t need to have an Apple account or device themselves. There may be time limits, however–for example, in the case of Apple, legacy contacts have three years to gain approval to access files, notes, messages, videos, photos, and other data. For Google–where it’s known as “Inactive Account Manager,” it can be set for any period between 3 and 18 months.
It’s also becoming more and more common for people to name a Digital Executor to their last will and testament. These can be set up easily through services such as Everplans and are similar to creating a Legacy Contact, but this person has a more of an active role in archiving and preserving your digital legacy.
A Digital Executor can archive your personal files, photos, videos, and other content you’ve created, delete specified files from your computer or other devices or even erase entire hard drives at your direction, and can close specified online accounts to stop payments. In addition, a Digital Executor can be asked to maintain accounts, transfer income-generating platforms (like a personal website) to your heirs, and other services.
At the end of the day, it’s a good habit to frequently back-up precious photos and data on a separate hard drive. It’s also a good habit to periodically create hard copies–either printing meaningful photos or creating curated books based on specific events like vacations, graduations, or just a particularly great summer. At best it’ll give you peace of mind should you lose or damage your phone and, at worst, it prevents your digital legacy from being locked away from your loved ones forever.
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