How to protect your Apple account while you are alive
Apple lets the account holder name, in advance, who may act on the account after a death, through Legacy Contact. Apple allows no transfer of the account while the holder is alive.
Apple's terms provide a path for an Apple account after a death, and what the account holder sets up in advance decides how smoothly that path runs. Apple lets the account holder name, in advance, who may act on the account after a death, through Legacy Contact. Apple allows no transfer of the account while the holder is alive.
How to protect your Apple accounts
Naming who acts after a death
- Legacy Contact
The account holder can add more than one Legacy Contact, from a Family Sharing group or from Contacts, who needs no Apple device or Apple Account and must be over 13 (the age varies by country or region). Any one of them can individually make decisions about the account data after death, including deleting it.1
What Apple Inc.'s terms say about sharing and transfers3
- Family plans and household sharing
Family Sharing lets an organizer and up to five other family members share access to Apple services such as iCloud+, Apple Music and Apple TV. The Digital Legacy program is separate from Family Sharing.2
- Exporting and backing up data
Each app has archive or copy options, and a full copy of the account data can be requested at privacy.apple.com.3
The Health app's Export All Health Data option saves an XML copy of Health data.3
- Transferring the account or registration
Apple documents a transfer of the Account Holder role for Apple Developer accounts, handled through Apple Developer Support and separate from Digital Legacy.4
Should you save your passwords for your family?
Some people store account passwords so a family member can sign in later. The practice has three practical limits:
- Two-factor authentication often blocks it. Most accounts require a second factor — a code sent to a phone, an authenticator app, a passkey, or a physical key. A saved password alone frequently does not grant access, and the recovery codes that would are easy to lose or let go stale.
- It usually conflicts with the platform's terms. Most operators prohibit account sharing and signing in as another person, including after a death. Stored credentials are not the operator's recognized access path, and using them can violate the terms of service.
- Operators provide other paths. Where an operator offers a designation tool — Apple's Legacy Contact, Google's Inactive Account Manager, a beneficiary designation — that mechanism grants access the operator recognizes. A password manager's own emergency-access or legacy feature passes credentials through a controlled process. Digital assets named in a will or trust give a fiduciary authority under each state's Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act (RUFADAA).
Sources
- support.apple.com
- apple.com
- developer.apple.com
- digital-legacy-account.apple.com
- digital-legacy.apple.com
Data sourced from Apple Inc. primary sources (15 pages reviewed). How we research.
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