Digital Legacy Instructions for Your Executor: A Perth Carer’s Plan for Your Parent’s Photos, Journals, and Accounts

You’re helping an older parent in Perth get their affairs in order. The will is drafted, the executor is named — usually a sibling, a long-time friend, or you. What’s missing is everything that lives on the phone and in the cloud: forty years of family photos, the journals Mum kept after Dad died, the Facebook account that’s become her main contact with cousins in the UK, the voice notes she records when her memory is patchy. If she loses capacity tomorrow, none of that is reachable without her PIN. The plan is to leave the executor a clear inventory — what exists, where it lives, what should happen to it — without ever handing over a password.

The problem

Australian families routinely lose decades of photos and writing because the device PIN was never shared and cloud-account recovery requires identity documents the family can’t produce after a death or capacity event. ASIC’s MoneySmart estate planning guidance points out that a will deals with assets the executor can identify — and an executor can’t administer what they don’t know exists. A photo library on an iPhone, a Google Drive full of scanned letters, a Facebook account with twelve years of family messages: legally these are part of the estate’s digital footprint, but practically they’re invisible to the executor unless someone wrote them down.

For a carer, the harder problem is the gap between capacity loss and death. If your parent has a stroke next month, the executor’s authority hasn’t activated yet — but you still need to know where the photos are, who the recovery contact is on the Apple ID, and whether your mother wanted the Facebook account memorialised or deleted. An instruction layer covers both scenarios.

What the Asset Instruction Vault does

The Digital Legacy Vault is an asset-instruction register: your parent (or you, working with them) records what digital material exists, where it lives, who the recovery contact is, and what should happen to each item. For digital legacy, the vault records: which devices hold what (the iPhone, the old iPad in the drawer, the laptop), which cloud accounts back them up (iCloud, Google Photos, Dropbox), who is named as the Apple Legacy Contact or Google Inactive Account recovery contact, and the intended fate of each collection — archive to family, publish, memorialise, or delete.

The Digital Legacy Vault holds instructions about what exists and how your executor can find it — not the device PIN, not the iCloud password, not the recovery codes. It records that an Apple Legacy Contact is named and who that person is; it does not store the access key Apple issues to that contact. That distinction is what keeps the vault outside the AFSL regime under Corporations Act Part 7.6 and outside AUSTRAC’s reporting obligations: it is not a financial product, not a custody service, not advice. It is an instructions register, governed by the Privacy Act and the Australian Privacy Principles in how it handles your parent’s and the executor’s personal information.

How it works

  1. You sit down with your parent and list each device and cloud account that holds something they’d want preserved. The vault prompts for the categories — photos, journals, social media, creative work, voice notes.
  2. For each item you record where it lives, who the recovery contact is (Apple Legacy Contact, Google Inactive Account Manager, etc.), and the intended fate: archive to family, publish, memorialise, delete.
  3. You name the executor as the recipient for the digital legacy module. The vault records their consent.
  4. You set the release rules — typically on death (verified by certificate) and optionally on a documented capacity event so the executor or attorney can act early.
  5. When released, the executor sees only the digital legacy module. They contact Apple, Google, or Meta directly using the recovery arrangements your parent set up. The vault tells them what to ask for; it doesn’t hand them a login.

Why this matters in Perth

Perth families are often geographically stretched — the executor sibling in Melbourne, cousins in the UK, grandchildren in Singapore. When an older parent in Perth loses capacity or dies, the executor frequently isn’t in the room and can’t pick up the phone Mum left on the kitchen bench. The window to recover an iCloud library before the account is locked or recycled is short, and Apple, Google, and Meta each have their own process — Apple’s Legacy Contact, Google’s Inactive Account Manager, Facebook’s memorialisation request. A Perth executor working from interstate needs to know which process applies to which account before they begin, not after three weeks of guessing. An instruction register prepared while your parent still has capacity is the difference between a family archive that survives and one that gets locked behind an identity-verification wall nobody can clear.

Sources

Join the waitlist

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

We’re opening waitlist access in tranches. Sign up to be notified when carers and families in Perth can register a first digital legacy module for an aging parent. The Digital Legacy Vault holds instructions about what exists and how your executor can find it — not the device PIN, not the iCloud password, and not the recovery codes.