Digital Legacy Instructions for Your Adult Children: A Melbourne Plan for the Photos, Journals, and Creative Work You Want Them to Find

You’re in Melbourne, your kids are grown, and your phone is twenty years of family — Brunswick Street birthdays, the Otways trip, a folder of poems no one has read. There’s also a laptop with old journals, a Google account that holds most of the photos, and a Facebook history you’ve never thought about as an “asset”. The plan is to leave your adult children a clear list of where these things live and what you want done with each of them — without ever handing over a password.

The problem

When an Australian parent dies or loses capacity, the family typically discovers two things at once: the lifetime of memory is almost entirely digital, and almost none of it is reachable. The phone PIN is unknown. The cloud account is locked behind two-factor authentication tied to that same phone. The recovery email points to an address no one can open. Apple, Google and Meta all require identity documentation, sometimes a court order, before they’ll release account contents — and the process can take months.

ASIC’s MoneySmart estate planning guidance reminds Australians that a will deals with property, but says nothing useful about which device holds what, who the recovery contact is, or whether you wanted those journals archived or deleted. Your children don’t need your passwords. They need to know: which device holds the original photos, which cloud account they’re synced to, who you’ve set as recovery contact, and — the part most parents never write down — what you actually want them to do with each category. Keep the photos. Print the poems. Delete the journals unread. Without that instruction layer, families either lose everything or fight about what to keep.

What the Digital Legacy Vault does

The Digital Legacy Vault is an asset-instruction register: you record what you own, where to find it, and who you’ve nominated to receive the instructions. The simplified version (built for individuals and families) records, per digital-legacy item: the device or platform it lives on (phone, laptop, iCloud, Google Photos, Dropbox, Instagram, Facebook), the account identifier or email address attached, the recovery-contact arrangement you’ve set up with the provider, and your intended fate for that material — archive to family, publish, or delete unread. It does NOT hold your PIN, your account password, or your two-factor codes. Your adult 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 and outside AUSTRAC reporting — and it’s also why it can be a simple subscription rather than a regulated product. Because vault contents are personal information about you and the children you name, the vault is built to Australian Privacy Principles standards under the Privacy Act 1988.

How it works

  1. You add each digital-legacy item to your vault — the device or platform, the account email or handle, and the recovery contact you’ve nominated with that provider (Apple Legacy Contact, Google Inactive Account Manager, Facebook Legacy Contact).
  2. For each item you record your intended fate: archive to the family, publish a selection, or delete unread. Journals and creative drafts get the most attention here.
  3. You name your adult children as the recipients for the digital-legacy module and they accept (the vault records their consent, which matters under the Privacy Act because you’re nominating them to receive personal information).
  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 them too.
  5. Your children use the inventory to approach each platform with the provider’s own bereavement or legacy process. The vault accelerates the finding and the deciding steps, not the platform’s identity checks.

Why this matters in Melbourne

Melbourne households skew long-tenure digital — many adults here have held the same Gmail or iCloud account since the late 2000s, with a decade or more of photos accumulated across phone upgrades. The most common loss pattern Australian families report isn’t dramatic: it’s a parent’s phone that no one can unlock, a cloud account that locks itself after too many failed attempts, and adult children in Carlton or Footscray who are told by a support agent that without the original recovery email they cannot help. A clear instruction set — what exists, where, who the recovery contact is, and what you wanted done — is what keeps the photos from being silently lost while the family is still working out what day the funeral is.

Sources

Join the waitlist

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

We’re opening waitlist access in tranches. Sign up to be notified when individual adults in Melbourne 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 two-factor codes.