Planning what you leave behind online
Introduction
Most of us open new online accounts without a second thought. Ordering a pair of shoes, testing an app, opening up a crypto wallet or signing up for a streaming service each leaves behind a username, an address, often a payment method, and sometimes photos that stay publicly visible. Over the years these accounts pile up quietly, and few people could list all of their own from memory, let alone hand that list to someone else.
Few people consider what happens to those accounts once they are gone. SRF’s “10 vor 10” took up the question in November 2026, and the picture it drew is a practical one: subscriptions keep charging, balances go undiscovered, and personal data stays online long after its owner has passed. The family inherits the work of finding, closing, or preserving all of it, usually at the moment they are least able to take it on.
Key Takeaways
- Most people have more online accounts than they could list from memory, and their families often don’t know where to find them.
- Swiss law hasn’t clearly answered how far providers’ own rules can limit what a family is entitled to, so having the right isn’t always enough to get in.
- What families need comes down to three things: access to the accounts that matter, clear instructions for each one, and a trusted person who can start the process.
- In the ZHAW Swiss Inheritance Study 2023, only 52 percent of respondents had put their affairs in order, and many postpone it for years.
- A will remains the legally binding instrument, and a lasting power of attorney covers the case where you can no longer act yourself.
When having the right isn’t enough to get in
It seems natural that a family would inherit online accounts the same way it inherits a house or a bank account. Laws differ from country to country, but in many places the reality is less tidy, and Switzerland is a good example. As SRF explains, under Swiss law you can’t own data the way you own a physical object. A hard drive is passed on like any other belonging, and with it, in principle, the right to look at what’s stored on it.
Cloud services work differently. Opening an account means signing a contract with the provider, and that contract generally passes to the family. Many providers, however, set their own rules for the event of death, and those rules can make access to stored data harder or prevent it entirely. Swiss law hasn’t yet clearly answered how far those rules can limit what a family is entitled to.
Cordula Lötscher, professor of private law at the University of Basel, draws a practical conclusion in the SRF piece: people who want important data to reach their heirs should keep local copies, where inheritance and access rights are clear. The costliest version of the problem involves cryptocurrency held in self-custody. Without the private key or recovery phrase, those assets can stay out of reach even when there’s no doubt about who should receive them.
What families actually need
A list of accounts is a sensible place to start, and SRF recommends one covering email addresses, social networks, subscriptions, customer accounts, and banking relationships. A list on its own, though, tells a family what exists without giving them a way in.
What they need in practice comes down to three things:
- access to the accounts that matter,
- a clear instruction on what should happen to each one, and
- a trusted person who knows how to set the process in motion.
The instructions are where most planning falls short. SRF suggests recording which photos and documents relatives should receive, which profiles should remain or be deleted, and which information should stay private. Those decisions are easy to make for yourself and painful to guess on someone else’s behalf. A grieving family that finds a login without any guidance still has to decide whether a profile is a memorial to keep or an account to close, and whether a folder of letters was meant to be read.
It helps to know that the law makes no distinction between what you leave behind online and offline. Everything passes to your family in the same way. In practice, though, it pays to sort accounts by what is at stake. Anything with monetary value, such as cryptocurrency, balances with payment services, business websites and domains, or social media accounts that earn money, belongs in a will or inheritance contract. Accounts with emotional value, such as photo collections, cloud storage, and personal social media profiles, deserve the same care. Everything else, from email and messaging apps to streaming and shopping accounts, can be handled through clear written instructions. A few accounts are tied so closely to their owner, a dating profile for example, that they end with the person and cannot be inherited at all.
The same applies to organizations that serve families. Banks, insurers, and advisors already help clients plan what happens to their assets, and what people leave behind online increasingly sits right next to their finances. The account that holds the e-banking login, the folder with the insurance policies, and the inbox where every password reset lands all belong to the same conversation.
Where to start
None of this requires a lawyer to begin. A first pass takes an evening, and a complete picture builds up over a few weeks. The steps below follow the order in which they tend to pay off.
- Take stock of your accounts, starting with email. Your primary inbox is usually the route for resetting every other password, which makes it the account your family will need first. Since few people remember every service they use, keep a running note for a few weeks of each service you log into or receive email from.
- Clean up as you go. Close accounts and cancel subscriptions you no longer use, because paid subscriptions left running generally have to be paid by the heirs until they can be ended under the normal notice terms. The smaller your footprint, the easier it is for the people who follow.
- Keep credentials in one secure place, such as a password manager, so the inventory and the access live together and stay current.
- Write down what should happen to each account and its data: keep it, transfer it, archive it, or delete it.
- Check the legacy settings the services themselves offer. Facebook lets you name a legacy contact or request that your profile be deleted, Apple lets you add a legacy contact to your account, and Google lets you decide what happens to your account after a period of inactivity. Other services offer no such setting at all, which is exactly why your own instructions matter.
- Choose a trusted person, ask whether they are willing to take on the role, and make sure they know how your family can get access. Plan for incapacity as well as death. In Switzerland, a lasting power of attorney (Vorsorgeauftrag) is the place to set out who may access your online banking and other accounts if you can no longer act yourself.
- Keep local copies of the documents and photos that matter most, following the advice from the University of Basel quoted above.
- Handle cryptocurrency deliberately, since it is the one asset that can be lost completely. Write a simple access plan, store the recovery phrase separately from it, and keep the phrase out of your will, which co-heirs and authorities will read. Crypto held in a bank custody account follows the same path as other securities and needs no extra technical arrangements.
- Connect your plan to your will. For your wishes to be legally binding, they need to be written down in a will that meets the legal requirements, and a note in an app can’t replace that. A short line in your will saying where your online arrangements are kept helps the person handling your affairs find them.
- Revisit the plan when your life changes, whether through a move, a new relationship, or a new financial account.
If nothing was arranged
Many families come to this topic only after a loss, so a few steps help when a loved one left no plan. The inbox and credit card statements are the best starting points, because they show which services the person used and paid for. Paid subscriptions should be cancelled quickly to stop further charges, and important data should be saved as early as possible, since some platforms delete accounts once they learn of a death. People also often signed up under nicknames or abbreviations, so a search by full name can miss accounts.
How we approach data inheritance at SecureSafe
The legal uncertainty SRF describes comes from cloud providers whose terms were never written with families in mind. A provider can address that from its side by designing the handover into the product. That principle shapes how we built data inheritance in SecureSafe.
Account holders assign specific passwords and files to the people they choose and leave each of them a personal message. They give a trusted person, the activator, a code that starts the process if the owner dies or can no longer access the account. Once the code is used, a blocking period begins, during which the owner can still log in and stop the process if it was triggered by mistake. Only after that period do the chosen people receive access to what was assigned to them. SecureSafe users can set this up in their account settings, and our help center explains each step.
The instructions matter as much as the access. Every password entry in SecureSafe carries a field for free text, where you can record what should happen to that account. It is a small habit that spares your family a large guess.
SecureSafe helps your family get access and follow your wishes, but only a valid will can legally decide who inherits what. It also leaves the rules of other platforms unchanged: a family that receives a login still operates within the terms of the service it belongs to. What it does change is the starting point, from a family searching for passwords to a family following clear instructions.
Conclusion
Planning for what you leave behind online tends to get postponed because it feels premature, and that is precisely what makes now the right moment. The decisions are clearest while you can still make them calmly, the accounts are easiest to list while you still remember them, and a plan is cheapest to keep current once it exists.
Swiss research on how people plan what they leave behind shows how wide the gap between intention and action is. In the Swiss Inheritance Study 2023 by the ZHAW School of Management and Law, only 52 percent of respondents in German-speaking Switzerland who expect to leave something behind had already put their affairs in order. Those who had not mostly believed they still had plenty of time, and several years often passed between first thinking about it and acting on it. Even professional advice is no guarantee: an analysis of advisory cases in the same study found that about a third of recommendations were never implemented. What we leave behind online is easy to forget in that process entirely, even though it is often the hardest part for a family to piece together afterward.
The accounts most of us have collected over the years will not organize themselves. Each one is either a loose end your family has to trace or a line in a plan you made for them. An evening spent on the second option is one of the more considerate things any of us can do for the people we leave behind.
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