Digital will: access, an encrypted envelope and trustees

It varies, and almost always badly. Google simply keeps the account until it goes inactive; Apple, with no legacy contact set, requires relatives to obtain a court order; Facebook memorialises a profile on request but nobody can manage it; bank and brokerage accounts pass through the ordinary probate process; and cryptocurrency without the seed phrase is not inherited at all — it simply ceases to exist. And separately: Telegram will delete the account by itself after a period of inactivity.

You set an inactivity period — from three to eighteen months — and up to ten trusted contacts. If you have not signed in for that whole period, Google first tries to reach you through backup channels, then notifies your contacts and, if you allowed it, releases the data you selected. You can also enable automatic deletion of the account afterwards. It is the most capable free mechanism available, and it takes five minutes to set up.

Legacy Contact: up to five people who can obtain access to your Apple account data after your death. It requires iOS 15.2 or later and is configured in the account's sign-in and security settings. The contact is given an access key — print it and hand it over in person — and will need that key plus a death certificate.

Yes, and it is a privacy setting rather than a punishment. By default the account self-destructs after six months of inactivity; the range is one to twelve months, and the feature cannot be turned off entirely. There are two practical consequences for a legacy: set it to twelve months if the archive matters to you, and remember that a long illness without a phone in your hand produces the same result as death.

You can, and it beats doing nothing. It has two problems. First, a password list goes stale within months and nobody rewrites it by hand. Second, whoever reaches the safe gets everything at once and right now — and safes are opened while their owner is alive. Encryption plus shares solves both: the envelope is updated by overwriting one file, and nobody can open it alone.

The key is mathematically divided so that any given number of shares reconstructs it and any fewer reconstructs nothing at all. Two of three survives the loss of one share and prevents any single person opening the envelope. Three of three looks safer but is brittle: people lose pieces of paper, move house, fall out and die before you, and losing any one share closes the envelope forever. It is the most common way to bury your own will.

People who will outlive you, will not lose a card, and do not live in the same flat. That last point matters more than it sounds: two of three shares in one household means a fire or a burglary settles the question for you, in both directions at once. A sensible arrangement is a close relative, a distant one in another city, and optionally a lawyer or notary.

People are watching. You agree a rhythm with your trustees — a short message every three months, say — and how many missed check-ins should prompt them to contact each other and gather the shares. A margin for holidays, hospital stays and a broken phone is essential: too short a window turns the scheme into a false-alarm generator, and a false alarm here means the envelope is opened while its owner is alive. The tool exports the reminder calendar.

Encryption happens in the browser and you download the encrypted file yourself. The plain text is deliberately not stored even in browser memory: a draft will left in the storage of a shared computer is exactly the disaster this whole exercise is meant to prevent. The inventory and the checkboxes are saved; the secret text is not.

No. A digital will in this sense is not a will but a set of access instructions. Inheritance of property, accounts and business shares is handled by a notary or solicitor under the law where you live; funeral wishes have their own form too. The two do not conflict: a legal will distributes the estate, and this envelope makes sure the heirs can actually reach it.

Rewrite the envelope and hand out new shares — the old ones stop working because the key is different. A sensible rhythm is once a year, together with a check that the envelope still opens. Put it in the calendar the same way as the check-ins: the tool exports both.

Find the other people who were given the same kind of slip: you do not need all of them, only the number of shares the owner chose — usually two of three. Then open the "Open the envelope" section on this page, paste the lines from the cards and the tool will reconstruct the key; after that pick the envelope file and decrypt it. Everything is computed in the browser and no account is needed. If the site is gone, open the envelope file in a text editor: the format is written at the bottom — the encryption parameters and the share scheme — which is enough for any programmer.