Until recently, a digital legacy could be imagined as a folder of family photos, an email account, and a handful of forgotten social media profiles. By 2026, that picture has become far more complex. One person may simultaneously have crypto assets, domains, business cloud archives, subscriptions, channels with audiences built over many years, voice recordings, and a vast body of data from which modern artificial intelligence models can create a recognizable digital version of that individual.
As a result, the question of digital legacy is no longer limited to what happens to a person's data after death. The need to transfer control may arise because of illness, temporary incapacity, a change in business ownership, or simply a desire to determine in advance who should have access to important information. As more of our financial, professional, and personal lives move online, one question becomes increasingly relevant: who will be able to manage them if, one day, we can no longer-or no longer wish to-do so ourselves?
The law is gradually catching up with this reality, but unevenly. In the United Kingdom, the Property (Digital Assets etc) Act was enacted in December 2025, confirming that digital objects, including crypto assets, can potentially be recognized as objects of property rights. The law does not, however, turn every file, account, or password into inheritable property. The boundaries of this new category will still need to be developed by the courts.
At the same time, technology companies have already established their own rules governing access to data, while artificial intelligence has added a new question to the old one of "Who inherits my digital archive?": what can be done with a digital version of a person once that person no longer controls how it is used?
One Digital Legacy, Four Different Types of Value
The main complexity begins with the definition itself. Photos stored in iCloud, Bitcoin, a social media account, and a library of purchased movies all exist in digital form, but legally and technically they operate in very different ways.
Digital assets can be property in their own right. Cryptocurrency, certain tokens, and other digital objects can have independent market value and may be treated as property in some jurisdictions. The UK's 2025 law partially addressed this legal uncertainty. The Law Commission specifically notes that crypto tokens and certain other digital assets may be protected as objects of property rights.
A cloud archive works differently. A person may own the underlying content, but access to it is also governed by the platform's terms of service.
A representative or heir may have a legal basis for obtaining certain information, but that does not mean the platform will simply hand over another person's password.
Google explicitly states that, in certain circumstances, it may provide family members or representatives with content from a user's account, but it does not provide passwords or other sign-in credentials. Google recommends setting up Inactive Account Manager in advance, allowing users to determine who should receive access to information and whether the account should be deleted after a prolonged period of inactivity.
Purchasing a digital product also does not always mean acquiring transferable property. Under Apple's system, a designated Legacy Contact may gain access to photos, messages, notes, files, and backups, for example, but not to movies, music, books, or subscriptions purchased through an Apple Account. Passwords, passkeys, and payment information stored in iCloud Keychain are also excluded.
This creates an unfamiliar arrangement: a person may spend decades building a digital library and paying for content, yet the ability to pass it on to someone else is determined not only by general inheritance rules but also by the licensing terms of a particular service.
Finally, there is digital identity-a person's name, photographs, face, voice, publications, writing style, professional reputation, and accumulated behavioral data. In the past, most of this remained a static archive. Today, it can become source material for creating new content that the person never produced themselves.
This is where digital legacy becomes much broader than a conventional collection of files and assets. It is no longer only about access to what was created in the past, but also about the ability to produce new content based on another person's identity.
A Will Does Not Override the Rules of Apple, Google, or Meta
In traditional inheritance planning, people are accustomed to assuming that it is enough to express their wishes and that their property will then pass to the designated beneficiaries. In the digital environment, however, another party almost always stands between the owner and the person they want to grant access to: the technology platform.
Apple allows users to designate one or more Legacy Contacts in advance. To use this feature, the designated person needs a special access key and supporting documentation. Once Apple verifies the request, it provides access to the permitted portion of the user's data. If several Legacy Contacts have been designated, each can act independently and may, among other things, decide to delete the information available to them.
Google uses a different model. Inactive Account Manager allows users to specify in advance what should happen after a prolonged period of inactivity: who should be notified, what data should be shared, and whether the account should later be deleted. If a person has not configured these settings, their representatives must contact Google separately, and any decision to provide content is made after review of the specific request.
Facebook offers memorialized profiles and legacy contacts. A legacy contact can change the profile and cover photos, respond to new friend requests, publish a pinned post, and, if the relevant setting has been enabled, download a copy of content the user posted. However, that person cannot log into the account as its owner, read private messages, delete old posts, or manage the profile without restrictions.
The differences are fundamental. Apple creates a mechanism for accessing data, Google focuses on a predefined inactivity scenario, and Meta separates management of a person's public digital presence from access to their private communications.
As a result, there is still no universal system of digital inheritance. A person may be able to transfer real estate and company ownership through familiar legal mechanisms, but for several digital platforms they may need to determine the fate of individual accounts separately in each service's settings.
The situation becomes more complicated if a person temporarily or permanently loses the ability to manage their own data. Most consumer-facing features described as "legacy contacts" are primarily designed for one scenario, even though a representative may be needed much earlier. In the United States, the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act specifically covers both cases where the owner has died and those in which the owner is no longer capable of managing digital assets independently. Access to the contents of email, messages, and social media, however, is more strictly restricted and in many cases requires the user's prior consent.
Modern digital legacy planning is therefore gradually beginning to resemble not only a will, but also a power of attorney: it is important to determine in advance who will be able to act on your behalf if, at some point, you are unable to manage part of your digital life yourself.
Digital Legacy Can Be Part of a Business
For a business owner, consultant, author, or public expert, this issue extends far beyond a personal archive. A digital footprint may be directly embedded in the mechanism by which income is generated.
A domain, business email account, advertising platform account, cloud documents, a subscriber channel, access to an online store, or a customer database may all be critical to daily operations. Yet while the company may legally be owned by several people, technical access to its key resources can remain tied for years to a single phone number and the founder's personal account.
Platform rules illustrate the scale of this risk. Meta states that a Facebook Page with only one administrator may be removed if that administrator's profile has been memorialized and an appropriate request is submitted. The business itself may continue to exist, but its digital infrastructure may effectively have been built as though the company and one individual were the same entity.
The same applies to knowledge. An entrepreneur may spend years keeping the history of negotiations in a personal inbox, storing business documents in a private cloud account, and using a personal phone for authentication. Legally, the business may belong to partners or new owners, but without a practical way to restore access, part of its operating value becomes significantly more difficult to use.
Artificial intelligence adds another type of asset. A company can already create a virtual expert based on the founder's materials, use a synthesized version of their voice in content, or train an internal system on their documents, emails, and methodology. While the person remains actively involved in the business, questions about who owns such a model may seem secondary. Once they leave the company or become unavailable for an extended period, however, it becomes necessary to determine whether the model belongs to the company, the individual, or the technology provider; whether it may continue using the person's name and voice; and where the consent given when the system was created ends.
For businesses, this is gradually becoming an extension of ordinary succession planning. In the past, a founder needed to decide who would inherit shares and managerial authority. Today, that list increasingly includes control over digital infrastructure-and potentially over a digital version of the founder themselves.
This is not always about an emergency scenario. A company must remain operational whenever a key person becomes temporarily unavailable or leaves the business. The more processes depend on cloud services, personal accounts, and AI, the more digital continuity becomes a routine part of risk management.
From Archive to Digital Double
The most significant change in recent years is no longer simply about access to data, but about what technology can create from that data.
Messages preserve vocabulary and conversational style, social media captures views and interests, voice messages preserve a person's voice, and video preserves facial expressions and appearance. Together, this material can be used to create a chatbot, synthetic voice, or visual avatar that does more than reproduce stored information-it can generate entirely new responses.
A distinct body of academic research has already emerged around technologies that create interactive digital versions of people based on their messages, photographs, videos, and voice recordings. A study by Cardiff University and King's College London, published by Cambridge University Press in 2025, examined four existing services of this kind-Almaya, HereAfter, Séance AI, and You, Only Virtual. The authors highlight a fundamental shift: the archive stops being a fixed collection of memories and becomes a system that reconstructs them through interaction with the user.
This creates a new boundary between preserving information and extending a digital identity. A family video archive shows what a person actually said. An AI avatar can answer a question the person was never asked, using accumulated data, a probabilistic model, and decisions made by developers.
A recognizable digital double can potentially be created from the footprint of an ordinary user once enough data has been accumulated. This also introduces rights that previously rarely had to be separated. Permission to store someone's voice does not necessarily mean permission to generate new statements in that voice. Giving someone access to family photographs is not the same as consenting to the creation of an interactive avatar. Access to a personal archive also does not provide an obvious answer as to whether someone may alter the personality of the digital model, add new knowledge to it, or use it in a commercial project.
The law is already beginning to distinguish between a digital replica and ordinary content. In California, AB 1836 expanded protections for digital replicas of deceased performers: creating and distributing a realistic digital copy of their voice or likeness in certain works without the required consent may result in liability.
In Europe, Article 50 of the AI Act has applied since August 2, 2026, requiring people, in specified circumstances, to be informed when they are interacting with certain AI systems. Deepfakes and some other forms of synthetic content are also subject to transparency requirements concerning their artificial origin and machine-readable labeling (https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/guidelines-ai-transparency-obligations).
Yet these rules still leave many practical questions unanswered. Who should determine how a family AI archive may be used? Can such a model be changed over time? May it use information about other people that appears in private correspondence? And where does consent to preserve a digital footprint end and separate consent to generate new material in a person's name begin?
This is why an AI double is becoming increasingly difficult to treat as just another file. It can continue producing new content, which means the boundaries of its use require a separate decision.
How to Maintain Control Over Your Digital Footprint
As digital life becomes more complex, a list of passwords is no longer enough. It is important to decide in advance which data should remain accessible, which may be transferred to another person, what should be deleted, and what restrictions should apply to the use of one's voice, likeness, and AI models.
Some information may be intended for transfer: family photographs, manuscripts, documents, or assets. Some may need to be preserved but kept private, such as personal correspondence. Other information may be better deleted. Professional accounts, domains, and business archives may require a separate plan involving the company rather than the family.
Digital identity requires its own set of decisions. A person may want to preserve voice messages without allowing new statements to be generated in that voice. They may allow the creation of a family biographical AI archive but prohibit commercial use. They may consent to a digital assistant that answers questions about professional experience, but not to a model capable of generating new statements about private life, politics, or events that were never contained in the original data.
These distinctions will become increasingly important because AI is changing the very nature of the digital archive. An old diary remains an old diary regardless of who reads it, while a generative model can produce new content. In effect, a person leaves behind not only accumulated data, but also the possibility of creating new versions of their digital identity from that data.
By 2026, digital legacy can no longer be reduced to photographs, accounts, and cryptocurrency. It encompasses property, access, privacy, business operations, intellectual output, and control over one's own digital identity. As more of our lives move online, it becomes increasingly useful to define a few simple rules in advance: what should remain accessible, whom we are prepared to trust with control, and where we draw the line around the use of personal data and our digital likeness.
Ultimately, digital legacy is another way to preserve control over what we create today-even if circumstances change tomorrow.
