Living Digital Lives: What Happens to Your Digital Assets When You Die?
Think about how much of your life now sits on your phone or laptop. Years of family photographs. Emails going back more than a decade. Social media accounts, online banking, a PayPal balance you had forgotten about and a handful of subscriptions quietly renewing every month.
For most of us, a large part of our lives, and sometimes a surprising amount of our money, now exists only online. Yet very few people stop to think about what happens to it all when they die. Here we look at what counts as a digital asset, what the law now says, and some simple steps that will make life much easier for your executors.
What is a digital asset?
Digital assets fall broadly into three groups.
Assets with financial value: online payment balances such as PayPal, cryptocurrency, online-only bank and investment accounts, domain names and websites, and income-earning accounts such as an online shop, a video channel or self-published e-books.
Assets with sentimental value: photographs and videos stored in the cloud, email accounts, social media profiles, blogs and personal documents. They may be worth little in money, but they can mean a great deal to your family.
Things that cost money: streaming services, software subscriptions, cloud storage and online memberships, which will keep charging until someone cancels them.
What the law now says
Scots law took an important step forward this year. The Digital Assets (Scotland) Act 2026 came into force on 1 July 2026. It confirms that certain digital assets, with cryptocurrency the most obvious example, are property in their own right, and classes them as moveable property.
That matters for anyone planning their estate. It means those assets form part of your estate, can be left in your Will and count towards the moveable estate from which a spouse, civil partner or children can claim legal rights.
The Act also presumes that whoever controls a digital asset owns it. For cryptocurrency, control normally means access to the private keys or recovery phrase. If nobody knows where those are kept, the asset can be lost for good, whatever the law says about who owns it.
What the Act does not cover is most of our everyday digital lives. Photographs, emails and social media accounts are still largely governed by the terms and conditions you accepted when you signed up, and many of those say the account is personal to you and cannot be transferred. Films, music and e-books you have "bought" are usually licences to use them, and those licences often end on death.
Why your executors need to know what exists
To obtain Confirmation, your executors must list everything you owned at the date of death, along with its value. They cannot include what they do not know about. If something comes to light later, they may need to prepare a corrective inventory and return to the court, adding time and cost. Our guide to what you need to do after a death explains the wider process.
There are practical problems too:
Subscriptions carry on taking payments.
Domain names expire, and a website or business email address can disappear with them.
Dormant accounts can become a target for fraudsters.
Family photographs stored on an unknown cloud account may be impossible to recover.
Most large providers have a bereavement process for closing accounts and releasing balances to executors. But that process can only begin if someone knows the account is there.
Why your passwords do not belong in your Will
It can be tempting to solve the problem by writing your usernames and passwords into your Will. Please do not.
Once Confirmation has been granted, a Scottish Will becomes a public document, and anyone can request a copy.
Passwords change, and many accounts use two-factor authentication, so a password on its own may not even work.
Logging into someone else's account with their password, however well meant, usually breaches the provider's terms and can, in some circumstances, risk falling foul of the Computer Misuse Act 1990.
Your executors should deal with your accounts through each provider's proper channels. A Will is a formal legal document and needs to be made properly to be effective, as we explained in Pencils, Unsent Letters and the Importance of Making Your Will Properly. It is no place for information that changes every few months.
A map, not the keys
What your executors really need is a map. We suggest keeping a simple record, separate from your Will, that sets out:
the online accounts and services you use;
any digital assets with value, and where they are held;
any subscriptions that will need to be cancelled; and
what you would like to happen to each account, for example whether a social media profile should be closed or kept as a memorial.
Keep it somewhere secure, review it from time to time and make sure your executors know where to find it. Wishes about who should receive copies of your photographs, or how particular accounts should be handled, can also be set out in a letter of wishes that sits alongside your Will.
It is also worth using the tools that the larger providers offer:
Apple lets you nominate a Legacy Contact who can request access to your photos, messages and files after your death.
Google's Inactive Account Manager lets you choose who receives your data if your account is inactive for a set period, or arrange for the account to be deleted.
Facebook lets you name a legacy contact to look after a memorialised profile, or ask for your account to be deleted instead.
These settings sit outside your Will, so it is worth checking that they are consistent with it.
Do not forget about incapacity
Digital assets are not only an issue on death. If illness or an accident left you unable to manage your own affairs, someone would need the authority to deal with your online banking, bills and accounts. A Power of Attorney can give a trusted person that authority, and it can be drafted to cover digital assets specifically. Our article What's the Right Age to Draw Up a Power of Attorney? explains why it is worth doing sooner rather than later.
How Stewart & Bennett can help
Our Wills & Executries team can review your Will to make sure your executors have clear powers to deal with digital assets, help you prepare a letter of wishes, and guide executors through Confirmation where digital assets form part of the estate. If your Will was made a few years ago, our article on how to change your Will explains your options.
To arrange an appointment, call our Legal Services team on 01369 702885 or get in touch with us online.
This article is provided for general information only and does not constitute legal advice. The information is accurate to the best of our knowledge at the date of publication, but laws and guidance change over time. If you need advice about your own circumstances, please contact us.