Digital Estate Planning FAQs

A digital asset is any electronically stored information or online account that you own or control. This category is broad and covers several distinct aspects of your life.

It includes financial accounts like online banking portfolios, digital payment processors, and cryptocurrency. Sentimental items such as family photos stored in cloud repositories, personal email accounts, and social media profiles are part of the equation as well.

Finally, it includes business assets like web domains, commercial e-commerce stores, and intellectual property. If it requires a username, password, or digital key to access, it is considered a digital asset.

Fiduciary access to online accounts is governed by the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act, commonly abbreviated as RUFADAA.

This law provides a structured legal framework that allows a personal representative, trustee, or agent under a power of attorney to interact with tech companies to manage or close your digital estate.

However, RUFADAA does not grant automatic, blanket access to everything you own online. The law establishes strict boundaries to protect user privacy, drawing a sharp line between the underlying management of an account and the actual content of your private communications.

Under RUFADAA rules, a personal representative or executor cannot access the actual content of your electronic communications, such as the text within emails, private social media messages, or direct texts, unless you have explicitly granted that authority in writing. Without your express, written consent, the tech company is legally prohibited from disclosing the substance of those messages.

If you do not provide explicit authorization in your estate planning documents, your personal representative is restricted to receiving a catalog of your communications. This catalog only includes metadata, such as the email addresses of the sender and recipient, alongside the date and time the message was sent, leaving the actual message text completely locked.

RUFADAA establishes a strict statutory hierarchy to determine which instructions take priority when a conflict arises, and online tools sit at the very top of that hierarchy.

When an online platform provides a built-in legacy tool, such as Google’s Inactive Account Manager or Apple’s Legacy Contact feature, and you configure your settings through that tool, those choices override any contrary instructions written in your will or trust.

If the platform does not offer an online tool, or if you choose not to use it, the instructions written in your traditional estate planning documents will control.

And if you leave no directions in either place, the account access defaults entirely to the company’s standard terms of service agreement, which often results in the immediate deletion of the account and permanent loss of the data.

Writing passwords down in a traditional will is highly discouraged. A will becomes a matter of public record once it is submitted to a Minnesota county probate court, meaning anyone could view your sensitive login credentials. Furthermore, because passwords change frequently, updating a will every time you reset a pin code is completely impractical.

Instead, a practical solution is to utilize an encrypted digital password manager. You can safely store all your credentials in one secure location and leave instructions in your estate plan explaining how your designated representative can access the master key or emergency recovery phrase.

Alternatively, you can maintain a confidential, offline master list stored in a secure home file or safe deposit box, ensuring your representative knows where to find it in a crisis.

Standard, older estate planning templates are designed around tangible, physical property. They authorize your representatives to manage your home, vehicle, and physical bank accounts, but they lack the specific, technical language required by federal privacy laws and state statutes to compel online service providers to cooperate.

To ensure your plan is effective, your will, trust, and power of attorney documents must include custom provisions that specifically reference RUFADAA. This language must explicitly grant your fiduciaries the legal authority to access, manage, download, or delete your digital assets, ensuring they have the legal standing required to work with corporate account custodians.