Ever curious about the fate of your social media accounts after you're gone? Each platform follows its own set of rules, making it crucial to understand these policies to manage your digital presence responsibly. Continue reading to learn more.

Following your death, unless you’ve planned ahead, some of your online accounts will survive indefinitely, while others automatically expire after a period of inactivity. Still, others have specific processes that let you give family and friends the ability to access and posthumously manage your accounts.

In parts one and two of this series, we covered the processes that Facebook, Google, Instagram, Twitter, and Apple offer to manage your digital accounts following your death. In part three, we’ll conclude this series by covering the most effective methods for including digital assets in your estate plan.

If you have preferences about what happens to your digital footprint after your death, you need to take action. Otherwise, your online legacy will be determined for you—and not by you. If you have any online accounts, such as Gmail, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Apple, or Amazon, you have a digital legacy, and that legacy is yours to preserve or lose.

Following your death, unless you’ve planned ahead, some of your online accounts will survive indefinitely, while others automatically expire after a period of inactivity. Still, others have specific processes that let you give family and friends the ability to access and posthumously manage your accounts.

We live in a digital age.  Everyone and everything are online. We shop, pay bills, play games, listen to music, order groceries, and so on, all from our online accounts.  It’s a valuable sphere and, consequentially, people are resistant to store passwords for fear that their password storage app will get hacked. But think for a minute of the opposite scenario.  What if someone needed to access your account but couldn’t?  What if you needed to, but couldn’t, turn off that bill pay or shut down your Facebook account?