Digital Assets and Estate Planning: Who Gets Your Online Accounts?

By Anjali Patel, Estate Planning Attorney at Tyler Allen Law Firm in Phoenix, Arizona

Digital assets and estate planning intersect in a way most Arizona families have never thought through, which is why so many personal representatives end up locked out of the exact accounts they need most. Your email, photos, banking apps, cryptocurrency, business accounts, and even the airline miles you have been hoarding are all digital assets, and none of them pass to your family automatically. Arizona has a specific statute governing who can access online accounts after death or incapacity, and the short version is that the law gives your family a path, but only if your documents and your account settings actually open it.

Who gets your online accounts when you die in Arizona?

Arizona's Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act, A.R.S. § 14-13101 and the sections that follow, sets a three-level priority. First, whatever you designated in a platform's own legacy or inactive-account tool controls. Second, if you used no online tool, the authority you granted in your will, trust, or power of attorney controls. Third, if you did neither, the platform's terms of service decide, and those terms usually favor the platform.

What counts as a digital asset

The category is broader than most people expect, and more valuable. Email accounts are the hub everything else resets through. Photo and cloud storage libraries hold what families actually grieve losing. Financial life increasingly runs through online-only banks, brokerage apps, payment platforms, and cryptocurrency, where the asset itself may exist nowhere but behind a login. Add domain names, a monetized YouTube channel or social account, seller accounts, loyalty points and miles, subscriptions quietly billing a card, and for business owners, the company's entire operational stack of ad accounts, software, and customer data. When someone dies without a plan for any of this, the family's problem is not just sentimental. Bills keep auto-paying, businesses stall, and assets sit invisible because no paper statement ever arrives to reveal they exist.

How Arizona's three-tier system works

The first tier is the one almost nobody uses and everybody should. Major platforms offer their own designation tools: Google's Inactive Account Manager, Apple's Legacy Contact, Facebook's legacy contact settings, and similar features elsewhere. These work like beneficiary designations for access, and under Arizona's statute they override everything, including your will. Ten minutes spent setting them on your most important accounts does more practical good than a paragraph of legal drafting, and the two work best together.

The second tier is your estate planning documents, and this is where older plans quietly fail. Arizona's law lets your personal representative, trustee, or agent under a power of attorney access digital assets, but the documents need to say so. Generic language about "all my property" is often not enough for a platform's compliance department, and documents drafted before Arizona adopted the statute in 2016 almost never include the right authorization. This is one of the specific things worth checking in the core documents every Arizona family should review, because adding digital asset powers is a simple amendment while you are alive and a genuine fight after.

The third tier is the default, and it is the bad one. Terms of service typically prohibit sharing passwords, prohibit account transfers, and permit the platform to close a deceased user's account and delete its contents. A family relying on tier three is writing letters to a custodian's legal department, attaching death certificates, and sometimes seeking a court order for each account, with no guarantee the content still exists by the time anyone answers.

Can my family read my emails and messages after I die?

Only if you explicitly said so. Arizona's statute draws a sharp line between the catalog of your electronic communications, meaning the metadata of who you corresponded with and when, and the content of those communications, meaning the actual emails and messages. A fiduciary can generally obtain the catalog. The content requires your explicit consent, given either through a platform's online tool or through specific language in your will, trust, or power of attorney. Without it, the platform can lawfully refuse, and the refusal usually sticks. Families are regularly surprised by this: they assume being the personal representative means reading Dad's email, and the law says it does not unless Dad authorized it.

That same line is also a privacy tool. If there are communications you would rather no one read, the statute lets you plan for that too, by granting access to what your family needs and withholding what they do not.

Why sharing passwords is not a plan

The workaround everyone reaches for is a list of passwords, and it is better than nothing while being worse than people think. Logging into a deceased person's account, even with a lovingly provided password, typically violates the platform's terms of service and can run afoul of computer access laws, which puts a grieving spouse in the strange position of technically breaching agreements to pay the electric bill. Passwords also rot: they change, accounts add two-factor authentication tied to a phone nobody can unlock, and the list in the desk drawer ages out within a year.

The better version of the same idea is an inventory plus a password manager with an emergency access feature, where a designated person can request access that unlocks after a waiting period. The inventory tells your fiduciary what exists; the legal authorization tells the platforms to cooperate; the password manager makes the practical side workable. One warning: never put passwords in the will itself. A will filed in probate becomes a public court record, and what actually happens in Arizona probate is public enough without your master password in the file.

Cryptocurrency is the extreme case

Crypto held on an exchange at least has a customer service department and falls within the statute's framework. Self-custodied crypto does not. A wallet controlled by a private key or seed phrase is functionally a bearer asset: whoever holds the phrase owns the coins, and no statute, court order, or death certificate can recover a key nobody recorded. Estates have lost six and seven figures this way. If you hold crypto in self-custody, the storage and succession plan for the seed phrase is the estate plan, and it needs the same care you would give a safe deposit box key, with instructions your fiduciary can actually follow. Unlike bank and retirement accounts, most of these assets also have no beneficiary designation to fall back on, which makes the planning documents carry more weight than they do for accounts that pass by designation.

The short to-do list

Set the legacy tools on your major accounts. Make sure your will, trust, and power of attorney expressly authorize digital asset access, including the content of communications if you want your family to have it. Keep an inventory somewhere your fiduciary will find it, with a password manager doing the heavy lifting. And revisit it annually, because your digital life turns over faster than the rest of your estate. None of it is complicated. All of it is invisible until the one moment it is the only thing that matters.

If you need help with your situation in Arizona, you can book a consultation directly here.