Who Will Inherit Your Digital Life? Digital Estate Part One

When someone dies, their family usually knows where to look for the keys to their home, contracts or bank records. What sits behind a password is far harder to find: years of photographs stored in the cloud, work files, an online business, income from digital content, a domain name or cryptocurrency. Some items carry mainly sentimental value; others may represent a substantial part of the estate. And sometimes heirs know that an asset exists but still cannot reach it.

More Than Photographs and Social Media

A digital estate is not a separate legal concept governed by its own rules. It is merely a label for very different things that a person leaves behind in the digital world. These include stored data and communication, contractual relationships with service providers and assets with real economic value.

A single account may combine all three. A social media profile may contain family photographs and private messages while also serving as a business tool that generates regular income. With cloud storage, the account is only part of the picture; the documents, photographs and original work stored within it may matter far more.

What Is Part of the Estate

The Czech Civil Code starts from a general rule: the estate comprises all of the deceased’s assets and liabilities, apart from rights and obligations exclusively attached to that person. Digital form does not in itself prevent an asset from passing to heirs. The estate may therefore include cryptocurrency, claims arising from an online business, income from digital content or rights connected with a domain name. The nature of the particular right is always decisive.

The same applies to original photographs, texts, videos or software. If they qualify as copyright works, the author’s economic rights pass by inheritance. The heirs may therefore acquire the right to continue using the work and receiving income from its use.

Digital content bought only for personal use may be different. Paying for an e-book, game or film does not necessarily give the user an asset that can be transferred to someone else. The user often receives only a licence, whose scope is determined by the service provider’s terms.

Inheriting a Right Does Not Guarantee Access

Two separate questions arise in every digital estate. First, does the right or asset pass to the heirs? Second, can they actually gain access to it? The answers may be different.

For an email account, social network or cloud storage service, the agreement with the provider, its terms and the applicable law are decisive. A provider may require a death certificate, a final probate decision or further evidence and will generally not disclose the username and password. Where a service is based on the user’s personal activity, death may also affect the continued existence of particular rights and obligations. This means that not all online accounts automatically pass to the heirs to the same extent.

The Facebook Account Case

A dispute involving the parents of a fifteen-year-old girl who died tragically in Germany, shows how difficult these questions can become. Facebook placed her account in memorialised status, and her parents, as heirs, sought access to its content.

In its judgment of 12 July 2018, case no. III ZR 183/17, the German Federal Court of Justice held that the contractual relationship governing a social media account generally passes to the heirs. They could therefore claim access both to the account and to the communication stored within it. The Court compared digital communications to letters and diaries, which may also pass as part of an estate.

The dispute did not end there. In 2020, the Court had to decide whether Facebook had complied by providing the parents with a data file. It held that a mere copy of the data was not an adequate substitute for access to the complete account in a form that allowed the heirs to view it. Their access was to be passive: they could inspect the content but could not continue communicating in the girl’s name.

The decisions were made under German law and do not bind Czech courts. They nevertheless provide a useful comparative argument in the Czech context. Above all, they show that a digital account cannot automatically be separated from the rights and obligations attached to it.

Privacy Does Not Disappear Entirely at Death

Even lawful access by heirs does not give them complete freedom to use the content they find. Recital 27 of the GDPR states that the Regulation does not apply to the personal data of deceased persons. Their emails and messages may, however, also contain the personal data of living individuals, to which data protection rules may still apply

The Czech Civil Code also allows close relatives to seek protection of the deceased’s personality and protects private correspondence. The right to read a message and the right to publish or otherwise use it are therefore separate questions.

Cryptocurrency Without a Key May Remain Out of Reach

Cryptocurrency illustrates the problem particularly clearly. Its value may form part of the estate, but a probate decision cannot replace a private key or recovery credentials. With a wallet controlled directly by the user, there is usually no institution able simply to reset a password for the heirs. If no one knows where to find the necessary information, the asset may remain permanently inaccessible.

The process is different where cryptocurrency is held through an exchange or another custodial service. Here, it depends on the actual agreement with the provider. However, the basic distinction remains the same: the legal entitlement to inherit an asset does not necessarily give the heirs practical control over it.

What Comes Next

A digital estate therefore lies at the intersection of succession law, the contractual rules of individual services and technical security. This first part has shown what a person may leave behind in the digital world and why heirs may not gain automatic access to those assets or data.

Our next issue will focus on practical preparation. We will explain

• how to create an inventory of accounts and digital assets,

• how legacy contacts and similar tools offered by Google, Apple and Meta work,

• how to prepare secure access to passwords or cryptocurrency, and

• which instructions should be linked to a will.

The quality and accuracy of estate planning often determines whether digital assets are preserved - or disappear permanently behind a locked account.

By Mgr. Jana Kostěncová

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