What Happens to Google, Apple, Facebook and myGov Accounts When You Die: The Australian Platform Guide

Search "what happens to my accounts when I die" and you will get a dozen different answers, because there is not one answer. Every platform wrote its own death policy, on its own timeline, with its own paperwork, its own definition of next of kin, and its own idea of what a grieving family can reasonably produce on request. Some hand over data. Most do not. One will not do anything beyond switching the account off.

This is the reference that gap deserves: what each major platform actually does, from their own published policies, current as at August 2026, and, for Australian families, why none of them add up to a plan.

Google. Inactive Account Manager

Google's approach is the most proactive in the industry, but only if it is set up in advance. Inactive Account Manager lets you nominate up to 10 trusted contacts and choose a timeout period, 3, 6, 12 or 18 months of inactivity, before anything happens. You decide ahead of time whether those contacts receive access to specific data such as Gmail, Photos and Drive, and whether the account is then deleted.

If it was never configured, Google says it can work with immediate family and representatives to close a deceased person's account where appropriate. That is a manual, discretionary support process, not a guaranteed outcome. Expect to supply a death certificate and proof of authority such as a grant of probate, and expect closure rather than content.

Bottom line: Best in class if set up ahead of time. Without it, families join a slow discretionary queue with no promise of access.

Apple. Digital Legacy

Apple's Digital Legacy program lets you nominate up to five Legacy Contacts. Each receives an access key generated in advance; after your death they can use that key plus a death certificate to request access to most iCloud data, including photos, messages, notes and files, via Apple's digital legacy portal.

Apple explicitly excludes several categories, payment information, subscriptions, and licensed media such as films, books and music you did not upload yourself. Without a nominated Legacy Contact, the family falls back on Apple's separate deceased-account request process, which requires a death certificate and, depending on what is being asked for, a court order.

Apple is also the platform most associated with hard device lockouts. Without the access key, Activation Lock can leave a family staring at a perfectly functional iPhone or Mac they physically own and cannot use.

Bottom line: Strong if nominated in advance. Without it, the most document-heavy process on this list, with a real risk of losing hardware as well as data.

Facebook and Instagram, memorialisation by default

Meta's policy is the most family-friendly on paper. Once Facebook is notified of a death, by anyone, not only family, the account is memorialised: "Remembering" is added to the name and the profile becomes a fixed space for friends and family. You can pre-select a legacy contact to manage that memorialised page, pin a tribute post, update the profile picture and respond to new friend requests, or you can instead elect for full deletion on death.

The legacy contact does not get login access, cannot read private messages and cannot post as the deceased. Instagram runs an equivalent memorialisation process but, as at 2026, still has no legacy contact feature, requests there are limited to memorialisation or removal, both requiring proof of death.

Bottom line: Good at preserving a public memorial. Not a mechanism for retrieving anything from behind the login.

X, no legacy tool at all

X has no legacy contact feature and no memorialisation state. The only official path is a deactivation request from a person authorised to act on behalf of the estate, or a verified immediate family member, with a death certificate. X's own help documentation describes deactivation and nothing else, no data handover, no ongoing access, no transfer.

An X account left untouched simply stays live until someone specifically initiates that request.

Bottom line: The weakest policy of any major platform. No advance option exists; the only lever is reactive deletion.

LinkedIn, memorialisation or closure

LinkedIn accepts a report of death from anyone, after which the family or an authorised party can request either memorialisation, the profile stays visible, marked, and stops being suggested for connections or messages, or full closure. Closure requires a death certificate plus documentation showing authority to act.

There is no legacy contact concept. Nobody is granted ongoing access or management rights either way.

Bottom line: A straightforward request process with two binary outcomes, and no advance planning option.

The Australian accounts nobody puts on this list

Most platform guides stop at the American technology companies. For an Australian executor, the harder accounts are usually domestic and governmental.

myGov. A deceased person's myGov account cannot be inherited, transferred or accessed by an executor. The credentials are personal and non-transferable. Every linked service, the ATO, Medicare, Centrelink, has to be dealt with directly with that agency, not through the portal the deceased used for all of it.

The ATO. Notifying the ATO of a death is its own process, and being recognised as the authorised legal personal representative requires a grant of probate or letters of administration. Only then can the executor deal with the deceased's tax affairs and lodge the date-of-death return.

The Australian Death Notification Service. A genuinely useful free service at deathnotification.gov.au that lets you notify many organisations, government agencies, banks, insurers, super funds, utilities and telcos, of a death in one step. It is worth using early. But read what it does carefully: it notifies. It does not grant access, release records, or close accounts on your behalf. Each organisation still runs its own process.

Superannuation. Super is generally not an estate asset at all. It is held on trust, and the trustee decides where the death benefit goes unless a valid binding death benefit nomination directs them. With APRA-regulated funds those nominations typically lapse after three years unless renewed. A nomination signed and forgotten is not a plan.

The pattern across every platform

Even where advance planning exists, three problems remain, and they are the same three every time.

Nobody sets all of them up. Inactive Account Manager, Apple's Legacy Contact and Facebook's legacy contact are three separate settings on three separate platforms that a person must configure, remember configuring, and keep current as their circumstances change. Most people who have done one have not done all three.

None of them talk to each other. An executor is not dealing with one account. They are dealing with email, cloud storage, social profiles, subscriptions, crypto, domains, loyalty points, utilities and myGov-linked services, each behind its own policy, portal and paperwork. Nothing tells them what existed in the first place.

None of them verify intent. A death certificate proves someone died. It does not tell Apple or Google or Meta whether the person asking is who the deceased actually wanted handling their digital life, or whether that account was meant to be handed over at all rather than quietly closed. Platform policies are built to avoid giving data to the wrong stranger. That is a low, generic bar, and it is not the same thing as honouring what you actually wanted.

What to do with this

Set up the tools that exist. Inactive Account Manager, Apple's Legacy Contact, Facebook's legacy contact. They are free, they take about twenty minutes in total, and they are genuinely better than nothing.

Then write down the part none of them cover: what you actually have, and what should happen to each of it. Australia has no statutory scheme giving executors access to digital records; the NSW Law Reform Commission recommended one in 2019 and no state has legislated it. Until that changes, the inventory you leave behind is the plan. Six platform policies stacked on top of each other are not.