What is a digital executor, and do you need one?

30 October 2026 · 7 min read

Your will says who gets the house and the savings. But who deals with your email, your photos, your social media, your subscriptions and the dozens of accounts you've opened over the years? More and more people are naming a "digital executor" for exactly that. Here's what the role involves, what the law says about it, and how to set someone up for success.

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What a digital executor does

A digital executor is the person who looks after your digital life after your death. In practice, that usually means:

Finding your devices and accounts, and securing them before anyone else can misuse them.
Saving what matters to your family, such as photos, videos and important documents.
Following your wishes for social media: memorializing or deleting profiles. See what happens to your Facebook and Instagram accounts.
Closing or transferring accounts and subscriptions, so payments stop.
Dealing with anything of value: domain names, online businesses, loyalty points, cryptocurrency. See our guide to crypto inheritance.
Deleting what you wanted kept private, if you asked them to.

Is it a legal role?

In most countries, "digital executor" isn't a formal legal title. Your executor, or whoever administers your estate, is responsible for your digital assets along with everything else. But you can name a person you trust with the digital side, and the law in some places now spells out what they may access.

United States

Most states have adopted the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act (RUFADAA). It gives executors and other fiduciaries a legal route to a person's digital assets, with a clear order of priority:

Online tools come first. What you set in a provider's own tool, such as Google's Inactive Account Manager, overrides everything else.
Then your will, trust or power of attorney, which can allow or forbid access.
Then the provider's terms of service.

The content of your emails and messages is treated with particular care: unless you've consented to its disclosure, your fiduciary may only get a list of your communications, not what they say. That's why it matters to state your wishes clearly.

United Kingdom

There's no equivalent law. Executors deal with digital assets under the general law and each provider's own process and terms, which is why the tools providers offer, such as Apple's Legacy Contact, Google's Inactive Account Manager and Facebook's legacy contact, matter so much.

Elsewhere

Rules vary from country to country. In Germany, for example, the Federal Court of Justice ruled in 2018 that the parents of a teenager who had died could inherit her Facebook account and its contents, just as heirs inherit letters and diaries. Check the rules where you live with a local professional.

How to choose your digital executor

Someone you trust completely. They may see private messages, photos and documents.
Someone organized and comfortable with technology, or at least happy to ask for help.
Someone your executor can work with, if it's not the same person. The executor still deals with anything that has money value.

How to prepare them

Make a list of your accounts and devices, including the ones nobody knows about. Our digital estate planning checklist helps.
Set up the providers' legacy tools and name your digital executor in them: Apple Legacy Contact, Google Inactive Account Manager, and the legacy contact on Facebook and Instagram.
Write down your wishes for each important account: keep, download, memorialize or delete.
Make access possible: where your devices are, their passcodes, and how each account is protected. See two-factor authentication after death.
Mention it in your will, with a lawyer's help, but keep passwords out of it. See should you put passwords in your will?

The zero-knowledge alternative: why we're building Heritkey

Heritkey is built to be your digital executor's starting point. Your account list, passwords, documents and wishes sit in one end-to-end encrypted vault. Nobody can read it while you're alive, not even us. The people you choose can open it after a waiting period you set, and you can refuse any request while you're able to. See how Heritkey works.