Apple is the latest example of a trend: More and more providers are adding a "data inheritance" function. This allows people to be designated who will have access to information, data and profiles after one's death. Better than such provider functions, however, are often overarching services that cover more than the company's own ecosystem.
At the same time, passwords are in many cases the central security factor between valuable data and an attacker. It is therefore all the more important that they are well chosen.
In the meantime, providers such as Facebook and Google have introduced a corresponding function for data inheritance. This makes it possible to regulate more or less precisely what is to happen to digital legacies after death.
With Facebook, for example, you can specify whether your account should then be permanently deleted or whether an estate contact should be allowed to manage the profile in a "memorial state". Google, on the other hand, has an "account inactivity manager". Here you can specify that the Google account should be deleted after a certain period of inactivity. Or, instead, you can designate a trusted person who will have access to selected information and services.
So far, Apple has been a latecomer in this area and only recently added such a function. The corresponding option can now be found in the settings on the Mac as well as on the iPhone and iPad, as long as the operating system is up-to-date enough: iOS 15.2, iPadOS 15.2 and macOS 12.1 are the minimum requirements.
If that is the case, you can find the estate contact feature in the iCloud settings in the "Security & password" section. Here you add people as estate contacts.
As an estate contact, you get access to photos, messages, notes, files, loaded apps, and device backups, among other things. However, purchased movies, music, books, or subscriptions, as well as information stored in the keychain, such as payment data and passwords, are explicitly not included.
Apple also points out that photos, for example, are only included if they were actually stored in iCloud. If a third-party provider was used, however, this is not the case.
This shows a general limitation of these inheritance offerings: They only cover the respective company's own ecosystem. So they help selectively. However, in view of the large number of services and platforms that we use today, this quickly becomes confusing. The range of functions also varies, and by no means every platform even offers such an option.
That's where a service like the inheritance function of our SecureSafe can be the better option, because it is independent of providers and devices. Here you store all important information and access data in a central location. You also have the option of specifying exactly which person gets which information. After all, your relatives need completely different data than your work colleagues, for example. By the way, we were the first to offer such a function.
In all of this, SecureSafe is as secure as its name suggests. We apply the same requirements to this product as we do to our offerings for banks: For example, the data is encrypted multiple times and secured three times. In addition, the approval process does not take place without your knowledge: Before estate contacts are granted access, we send e-mails and text messages to you. You can then still stop the process within an individually defined blocking period.
Last but not least, the SecureSafe is already useful during your lifetime, as you can use it to create and manage secure passwords, among other things. Since the SecureSafe is used (almost) daily, this in turn has an extremely positive effect on data inheritance: the data to be inherited in the SecureSafe is therefore generally up-to-date. On the other hand, the same applies to inheritance services that are used less frequently: The content is already outdated after a short time because, for example, passwords have been changed or perhaps created in the meantime but not transferred.
Physical legacies such as keys or ID cards are usually available to survivors without major hurdles. In the digital world, things are usually quite different, and this has more consequences than ever: from important company documents to irreplaceable family photos, numerous documents are now digitally secured behind access data. What is actually stored with which service is not always immediately clear. And access to computers and cell phones is usually also well secured.
Inheritance functions at Apple and Co. are helpful in this respect. But they are no substitute for digital estate planning.
