Digital Legacy Instructions for Your Adult Children: A Brisbane Plan So Your Photos, Journals and Voice Notes Don’t Disappear With Your Phone

You’re on your own now — divorced, widowed, or simply un-partnered — living in Brisbane, and your phone holds three decades of family. The photos from when your kids were small. The voice notes you sent your mother. A folder of half-finished writing you’ve never shown anyone. Your adult children have their own lives interstate or overseas, and if something happens, they’re the ones who’ll be standing in your kitchen wondering what the PIN is. The plan is to leave them a clear set of instructions about what exists, where it lives, and what you want done with it — without ever writing your passcode on a sticky note.

The problem

When an Australian adult dies or loses capacity, their digital life usually dies with their phone. The PIN was never shared. The iCloud or Google account is locked behind two-factor authentication that pings a number nobody can answer. The recovery contact was never set. Apple and Google both require identity documentation and, often, a court order before they’ll release account contents — and even then, much of the material (end-to-end encrypted backups, certain message histories) is genuinely unrecoverable.

ASIC MoneySmart’s estate planning guidance covers wills and beneficiary nominations, but a will doesn’t unlock a phone and a will doesn’t tell your daughter which of the four cloud accounts has the photos of her wedding. Without an instruction layer, your adult children spend their first weeks of grief on tech support phone queues, and frequently lose the material anyway.

What the Digital Legacy Vault does

The Digital Legacy Vault is an asset-instruction register: you record what exists, where to find it, who you’ve named as recovery contact, and what you want done with each category of material. The simplified version (built for individuals and families) records, per item: the device or account where the material lives, the type of content (photos, journals, social media, voice notes, creative work), the recovery contact you’ve already set up with the platform, and your intended fate for each category — archive to your children, delete, or publish.

It does NOT hold your phone PIN, your iCloud password, your Google recovery code, or any credential. The Digital Legacy Vault holds instructions about what exists and how your adult children can find it — not your passcodes, not your recovery phrases, not your accounts themselves. Your children see the inventory you’ve prepared for them, only when you’ve released it.

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 under Corporations Act Part 7.6 and outside AUSTRAC reporting obligations — and it’s also why your personal information inside it is governed by the Privacy Act 1988 and the Australian Privacy Principles, not by financial services law.

How it works

  1. You list each location your digital life lives — iPhone, iPad, MacBook, iCloud, Google Photos, Dropbox, the old external drive in the spare room, your Instagram, your private Substack drafts.
  2. For each location, you record the type of content, the recovery contact you’ve set on the platform (Apple Legacy Contact, Google Inactive Account Manager, etc.), and what you want done with it: archive to your children, delete, publish, or decide-later.
  3. You name your adult children as the recipients for the digital legacy module and they accept (the vault records their consent under the Australian Privacy Principles).
  4. If something happens, your children are notified per your release rules and see only the digital legacy instructions module — not your other modules unless you’ve released those too.
  5. Your children contact each platform directly using your recovery-contact arrangements and the instructions you’ve left. The vault accelerates the finding and intent step. The platforms’ own legacy processes still apply.

Why this matters in Brisbane

Brisbane families are often geographically spread — adult children in Melbourne, Sydney, London, sometimes all three. When a parent in Paddington or Chermside has a stroke or a sudden death, the kids fly in, get a week of compassionate leave, and have to make decisions about a house, a funeral, and a phone that nobody can unlock. By the time they fly home, the iCloud account has often auto-purged, the Instagram is in memorialised limbo, and the voice notes are gone. A short instruction set — what’s where, who’s the recovery contact, what you want kept — is the difference between your grandchildren one day seeing footage of you, and a black rectangle on a charger.

Sources

Join the waitlist

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

We’re opening waitlist access in tranches. Sign up to be notified when individuals in Brisbane can register their first digital legacy module. The Digital Legacy Vault holds instructions about what exists and how your adult children can find it — not your phone PIN, not your iCloud password, and not your accounts themselves.