Digital Legacy Instructions for Your Executor: A Brisbane Carer’s Plan for a Parent’s Photos, Journals, and Online Life

You’re helping your mum or dad in Brisbane get their affairs in order while they still can. The will names an executor — maybe you, maybe a sibling, maybe the family solicitor. The bank accounts and the house are the easy part. The hard part is forty years of photos on an old iPad, a Gmail account holding every email since 2008, a Facebook profile that has become a kind of journal, and a folder of writing nobody else has read. The plan is to leave the executor a clear instruction sheet — what exists, where it lives, who the recovery contact is, and what your parent wants done with it — without ever handing over a password.

The problem

When an older parent dies or loses capacity, the digital trail is usually the first thing the family loses. The phone PIN was never written down. The cloud account is locked behind two-factor authentication tied to a phone number the telco has already disconnected. The recovery email goes to an address nobody else can open. ASIC’s MoneySmart estate planning guidance frames the executor’s job as identifying and administering everything the deceased owned — but most executors arrive at the job with no map of the digital estate at all, and no lawful way to brute-force their way in.

The result, repeated in Brisbane families every week: a lifetime of photos sitting on a device nobody can unlock, creative work that never gets to the grandchildren, social accounts that drift into a strange half-life because nobody knows whether your parent wanted them archived, memorialised, or deleted. The executor isn’t being negligent. They simply weren’t told what existed.

What the Digital Legacy Vault does

The Digital Legacy Vault is an asset-instruction register. For the digital legacy module, your parent (with your help) records: which devices hold personal photos and journals, which cloud accounts back them up, who is listed as the account recovery contact, where physical backup drives are kept, and — critically — what should happen to each category of content (archive to family, publish, delete, hand to a specific person). The executor sees that inventory when release rules are met.

The vault does NOT hold passwords, device PINs, two-factor codes, or recovery seed words. It holds the map, not the keys. That boundary is what keeps the Digital Legacy Vault outside the AFSL regime under Corporations Act Part 7.6, outside AUSTRAC’s AML/CTF obligations, and aligned with the Australian Privacy Principles under the Privacy Act 1988 — your parent’s personal information is collected for the specific purpose they consented to, disclosed only to the recipient they named.

How it works

  1. You sit with your parent and list each digital asset: iPhone, iPad, the old Windows laptop, the iCloud account, the Gmail account, the Facebook profile, the box of USB sticks in the study.
  2. For each one, your parent records where it lives, who the existing recovery contact is (often a phone number or a secondary email), and the intended fate — archive, publish, delete, hand to a named family member.
  3. Your parent names the executor as the recipient for the digital legacy module. The executor accepts and the vault records that consent.
  4. When release rules are met (typically: death certificate plus the executor’s confirmation), the vault releases the digital legacy instructions to the executor. Other modules stay sealed unless they were released separately.
  5. The executor then approaches each platform through its own deceased-estate process — Apple’s Digital Legacy program, Google’s Inactive Account Manager, Facebook’s memorialisation request — armed with a clear list of what to ask for. The vault accelerates the knowing what to ask for step.

Why this matters in Brisbane

Queensland’s Succession Act gives the executor authority over the estate, but no platform — Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft — accepts a grant of probate as a substitute for the account holder’s own instructions. Brisbane families with an aging parent in Wynnum, Chermside, or out in the Redlands routinely discover this only after the funeral: the platforms require identity documents, account recovery details, and proof of relationship that the family doesn’t have to hand. A short instruction sheet prepared while your parent still has capacity — what accounts exist, who the recovery contact is, what the intended fate is — turns a six-month identity-verification ordeal into a one-afternoon administrative task for the executor.

Sources

Join the waitlist

Join the waitlist — first access when the Digital Legacy Vault opens for Brisbane carers

We’re opening waitlist access in tranches. Sign up to be notified when carers in Brisbane can register a first digital legacy module on behalf of (or alongside) an aging parent. The Digital Legacy Vault holds instructions about what exists and how your executor can find it — not device PINs, not cloud passwords, and not the photos themselves.