Online Account Instructions for a Trusted Friend: A Perth Carer’s Plan for an Aging Parent’s Digital Life

You’re caring for an aging parent in Perth. There’s no spouse, the siblings are interstate or overseas, and the person your parent has chosen to step in if their memory slips — or after they’re gone — is a long-trusted friend. Between your parent’s email, the old Hotmail account they still use for the bank, a Facebook profile full of photos no one else has copies of, and a OneDrive nobody can name — there’s a digital life that will quietly vanish if it isn’t written down somewhere before capacity declines.

The problem

When an older adult loses capacity or passes away, their online accounts don’t surface themselves. Email providers, photo services, and social platforms each run their own deceased-user and incapacity processes, and those processes generally require someone to first know the account exists. ASIC’s MoneySmart estate planning guidance is clear that organising affairs ahead of time — beneficiaries, contacts, where things are — is what separates a manageable transition from months of administrative grief. For digital accounts, that “where things are” step is almost never done.

The nominated friend doesn’t need your parent’s passwords. They need an inventory: which email addresses exist, which cloud storage holds the family photos, which Facebook account to memorialise, which password manager (if any) sits behind everything, and what your parent wanted done with each — kept, closed, downloaded, memorialised. Without that list, recovery is often impossible. Providers won’t disclose what they can’t first be told about.

What the Digital Legacy Vault does

The Digital Legacy Vault is an asset-instruction register: you record what your parent owns online, where to find it, and who has been nominated to receive the instructions. The simplified version (built for individuals and families) records, per account: provider name, the username or email identifier, whether a recovery contact has been set up at the provider, and your parent’s stated preference (memorialise, close, download-then-close, leave active). It does NOT store passwords, recovery codes, 2FA seeds, or security question answers. The nominated friend sees only the inventory you’ve prepared for them, only when release rules are met.

The boundary matters: the Digital Legacy Vault is not a financial product, not a custody service, and not an advice service. It’s an instructions register. That’s what keeps it outside the AFSL regime and outside AUSTRAC reporting — and it’s also why a carer can stand it up for a parent without crossing into regulated territory. Personal information about your parent and the named friend is held under Australian Privacy Principles obligations.

How it works

  1. You and your parent sit down once and enumerate the accounts — email, cloud storage, social media, photo libraries, password manager, loyalty programs, streaming, gaming. For each, you record provider and identifier only.
  2. For each account, you record whether a provider-side recovery contact (Apple Legacy Contact, Google Inactive Account Manager, Facebook Legacy Contact) has been set up — and a note if it hasn’t.
  3. You record your parent’s preference per account: memorialise, close, archive photos first, leave active for a period.
  4. You name the trusted friend as the recipient for the online-accounts module. The friend accepts and the vault records their consent.
  5. When release rules are triggered (incapacity confirmed, or death), the friend is notified and sees the online-accounts inventory — not other modules unless those have been released too. They then contact each provider directly, using the inventory plus the documentation each provider requires.

Why this matters in Perth

Perth families are more geographically stretched than most — adult children working FIFO rosters, siblings in the eastern states, lifelong friends nearby while blood relatives are five hours away by plane. The person an older Perth resident actually trusts to handle their inbox and their photos is often a friend down the road, not the executor named in the will. The Digital Legacy Vault lets a carer prepare a clean, scoped instruction set for that friend — without merging it into the formal estate paperwork and without handing over a single password.

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 in Perth can register a first online-accounts module on behalf of an aging parent. The Digital Legacy Vault holds instructions about what exists and how your parent’s nominated friend can find it — not passwords, not recovery codes, and not access to the accounts themselves.