Legacy Contacts: Setting Up Apple, Google, and Facebook's Official Handoffs

Why the official handoffs beat a shared password

The instinct is to solve this by writing your passwords on a card for your spouse. It feels simpler, and it is worse in almost every way. A password on a card goes stale the moment you change it, breaks the second a two-factor prompt appears, and often violates the terms of service you agreed to — which can get an account frozen exactly when your family needs it open.

The legacy-contact tools were built to replace that card. They share access on the platform's terms, survive password changes, and don't hand a live credential to anyone while you're alive. They also draw a clean line: the person you name gets a defined kind of access — your photos, your account data, the ability to memorialize a profile — not the run of your entire digital life.

Setting them up is one piece of a larger map, not the whole thing. If you haven't yet listed out every account your family would need to find, start with our companion guide, the digital estate planning checklist — the legacy contacts below are step three of that afternoon's work, not a substitute for it.

How to set up an Apple Legacy Contact

Apple's Legacy Contact lets a person you choose request access to your Apple Account data — photos, messages, notes, files, and more — after your death. When they make the request, Apple asks for two things: the access key generated when you set them up, and a copy of your death certificate. It is the most complete of the three handoffs, because so much of an Apple user's life lives in iCloud.

You can add a legacy contact from an iPhone, iPad, or Mac signed in to your Apple Account with two-factor authentication turned on:

• On iPhone or iPad, open Settings, tap your name at the top, then Sign-In & Security, then Legacy Contact. On a Mac, it's System Settings > your name > Sign-In & Security > Legacy Contact.
• Tap Add Legacy Contact and choose the person. If they're in a Family Sharing group, you can pick them directly; otherwise you can send the invitation as a message.
• Apple generates an access key. If your contact uses Apple devices, it's stored for them automatically. Either way, choose Print a Copy and keep that printout with your estate documents — it's the piece your family will actually need.
• Confirm and send. You can add more than one legacy contact, and you can remove one at any time.

How to set up Google's Inactive Account Manager

Google's tool works differently from the other two, and the difference matters. Instead of naming someone to act after your death, you tell Google what to do after your account has been inactive for a period you set — three, six, twelve, or eighteen months. Google tries to reach you first, then acts. It's less about death specifically and more about an account that has clearly gone quiet.

That framing has a real advantage: your chosen people can be notified and given access without producing a death certificate, because the trigger is inactivity, not a documented death. The trade-off is the waiting period, and the need to keep it current if your habits change.

Set it up from a computer or phone browser while signed in to your Google Account:

• Go to your Google Account, open the Data & privacy section, and scroll to Inactive Account Manager (or search that phrase in your account settings).
• Set the inactivity period — how long Google waits before treating the account as dormant — and the phone number and recovery email Google will use to check on you first.
• Add up to ten trusted contacts and choose what each may access — Gmail, Drive, Photos, and other data can be shared selectively. You decide whether they can download your data.
• Decide whether Google should delete the account automatically after the contacts have been notified. This is optional, and worth thinking about rather than accepting by reflex.

How to set up a Facebook legacy contact

Facebook's legacy contact governs what happens to your profile once it's memorialized — the state a Facebook account enters after the company is notified of a death. A memorialized profile stays visible as a place for friends to gather, with "Remembering" shown before your name. Your legacy contact can manage that space in limited ways; they cannot read your private messages, and that boundary is deliberate.

What your legacy contact can do: write a pinned post at the top of your profile, update your profile picture and cover photo, and request the account's removal. If you turn on the download permission before you die, they can also download a copy of what you shared. What they cannot do: log in as you, read your messages, see anything you didn't share with them while alive, remove any of your friends, or send new friend requests.

Set it from Facebook's settings, on the web or in the app:

• Open Settings & privacy > Settings, then find Memorialization settings (under your account or personal-details section, depending on your app version).
• Choose a friend as your legacy contact and, if you like, send them a short message letting them know. They won't get any access until your account is actually memorialized.
• Decide the account's fate up front: you can grant your legacy contact permission to download a copy of what you shared, or you can instead choose to have the account permanently deleted after your death rather than memorialized.
• Instagram, owned by the same company, has its own memorialization process handled after the fact by family or friends — worth noting if you keep photos there.

Record your choices where they'll be found

Here is the quiet failure mode of all three tools: people set them up, feel a well-earned sense of relief, and never tell anyone. A legacy contact who doesn't know they were named, holding no access key and no idea a memorialized profile is theirs to manage, is not much better than no plan at all.

So close the loop with a short written record kept alongside your will and estate documents. It doesn't need to be elaborate — it needs to exist and to be findable. For each platform, note that a legacy setting is in place, who it names, and where the supporting piece lives:

• Apple — the legacy contact's name, and where the printed access key is stored. Their request will also need your death certificate.
• Google — the inactivity period you chose, who's on the contact list, and whether auto-deletion is on.
• Facebook — who your legacy contact is, and whether you chose memorialization or deletion.
• A one-line heads-up to each person named, so the role doesn't arrive as a surprise at the worst possible time.

Keep the rest of your accounts in mind

These three cover an enormous share of most people's digital lives, but they are not everything. Your password manager likely has its own emergency-access feature — a trusted person can request entry with a waiting period you control — and it's often the single most valuable setting to turn on, because it reaches the accounts no platform-specific tool touches. Banks, brokerages, and subscriptions each have their own after-death processes that no legacy contact covers, and those tend to land on whoever is working through an executor's first thirty days.

The pattern that holds across all of them is the same one that makes the big three work: use the official channel each service already offers, record where the access instructions live, and never write the passwords themselves into the document. A record of where the keys are kept is a gift to your family. A list of the keys themselves is a liability sitting in a drawer.

Set the three legacy contacts this week — the settings take minutes each. Then write down that you did, and tell the people you named. This guide is an organizational aid rather than legal or financial advice, and platform menus shift over time, so treat the steps as a map and confirm the current wording in each app; for anything you want to be legally binding, mention your digital assets in your estate documents with an attorney. That last, unglamorous step — recording what you set and telling the people you named — is what turns three toggled switches into a plan your family can actually use.

Common questions