GLOSSARY
Plain words for a delicate subject
34 digital-estate and probate terms in plain language, with a link to an authoritative source where the law is involved. General information, not legal advice.
- Digital estate
- Everything you own or control online — accounts, files, photos, money, domains — considered as part of what you leave behind.
- Digital executor
- The person you've asked to handle your digital estate. Sometimes formal (named in a will), often practical (the one with the list).Start your plan →
- Legacy contact
- A person a platform will recognize after your death. Apple and Facebook both use this term for their official mechanisms.Apple's legacy contact →
- Inactive Account Manager
- Google's tool for deciding, in advance, who may receive your data — or whether the account should be deleted — after a period of inactivity.Google guide →
- Memorialization
- Converting a social profile into a remembrance page: content stays visible, logins are disabled, and 'happy birthday' reminders stop.Facebook memorialization →
- Emergency access
- A password-manager feature that grants a chosen person access after a waiting period — the cleanest legal handover of credentials.
- Death certificate (certified copy)
- The official document nearly every platform and bank requires. Executors typically need five to ten copies.CDC — how to get a copy ↗
- Probate
- The court-supervised process of settling an estate. Digital assets increasingly fall under it — especially anything with monetary value.Cornell Legal Information Institute ↗
- Executor
- The person named in a will to carry out its instructions and settle the estate. If there is no will, the court appoints an administrator instead.Cornell LII — executor ↗
- Letters testamentary
- The court document that formally authorizes an executor to act — banks and platforms often ask for it before releasing anything.Cornell LII — letters testamentary ↗
- Letters of administration
- The equivalent court authority when someone dies without a will and the court appoints an administrator to settle the estate.Cornell LII — administration ↗
- Intestate
- Dying without a valid will. State 'intestacy' law then decides who inherits — which may not match what you would have chosen.Cornell LII — intestacy ↗
- Fiduciary
- Anyone legally required to act in another's best interest — an executor, administrator, trustee, or agent under a power of attorney.Cornell LII — fiduciary ↗
- RUFADAA
- The Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act — the model law (adopted by most states) that lets your chosen fiduciary access your digital accounts, and why platforms ask for a legacy setting or a court order.Uniform Law Commission ↗
- Power of attorney
- A document letting someone act for you while you're alive; it ends at death, when the executor takes over. Useful for incapacity planning, not for after a death.Cornell LII — power of attorney ↗
- Beneficiary designation
- A formal on-platform transfer instruction, common for financial and retirement accounts — it generally overrides anything written in a will.
- Payable-on-death / transfer-on-death (POD/TOD)
- A beneficiary you name directly on a bank or brokerage account so it passes to them without probate.Consumer Financial Protection Bureau ↗
- Two-factor authentication (2FA)
- A second login step tied to a device or phone number. Vital in life; the main reason a locked phone can block an entire estate.
- Password manager
- An app that stores credentials behind one master password. With emergency access set up, it doubles as your digital-estate vault.
- Account inventory
- Your one-page list of which accounts exist — names, not passwords. The single most useful document you can leave.Prepare-now checklist →
- Digital assets
- The legal umbrella for the electronic records you own or control — emails, photos, documents, social accounts, domains, and cryptocurrency. RUFADAA governs who may reach them.Uniform Law Commission — Fiduciary Access ↗
- License vs. ownership
- Most 'purchases' of digital media (movies, ebooks, games) are personal licenses under the platform's terms — not property — so they usually can't be inherited.See Steam's policy →
- Terms of service (ToS)
- The contract you agree to on sign-up. It, not your will, usually decides whether an account can be transferred, memorialized, or only closed.
- Trust
- A legal arrangement where a trustee holds assets for beneficiaries. Assets in a trust generally pass outside probate, which can include digital property.Cornell LII — trust ↗
- Estate
- Everything a person owns at death — physical and digital — that must be gathered, valued, and distributed. Your digital estate is the online part of it.Cornell LII — estate ↗
- Next of kin
- A person's closest living relatives. Some platforms will act on a next-of-kin request with documentation, even without a court order.
- Successor (repository / account)
- A person you designate in advance to take over an account — used by developer platforms like GitHub to keep important projects reachable.GitHub ownership continuity →
- Cryptocurrency wallet
- Software or hardware that holds the keys to crypto assets. On an exchange, an estate can request access; for self-custody, the keys are the only way in.Crypto & exchanges →
- Seed phrase (recovery phrase)
- The 12–24 words that restore a self-custody crypto wallet. Lose it and the funds are unrecoverable — so it belongs, securely, in your estate plan.
- Cold storage / self-custody
- Holding crypto keys yourself, offline, rather than on an exchange. Safer from hackers, but there's no company to help your family recover it.
- Inactive-account deletion
- Many services quietly delete accounts after a long period without a sign-in. It can erase data your family wanted — one reason to plan, not just wait.Google's inactivity tool →
- Recovery contact / recovery key
- A trusted person or a stored key some platforms let you set to help regain access. Set now, it can spare an executor a locked account later.
- Right to erasure
- The ability (under privacy laws like the GDPR and some U.S. state laws) to have personal data deleted — sometimes exercisable by an estate on a person's behalf.
- Obituary / proof of death
- Documentation platforms may accept in place of a certified death certificate for lower-stakes requests, such as memorializing or closing a social account.