Digital Legacy Instructions for Your Adult Children: A Perth Parent’s Plan for the Photos, Journals, and Creative Work

You live in Perth, your kids are grown and probably scattered between here, the eastern states, and overseas. On your phone and across two or three cloud accounts sits twenty years of family photos, the journal you’ve kept since the divorce, voice notes from your mum before she died, and the half-finished memoir nobody’s read. You want your adult children to inherit those things — not lose them to a forgotten PIN and an Apple ID recovery process they can’t complete from Melbourne.

The problem

The way most Australians store their digital lives now, almost nothing survives without the password. A phone locks after the funeral. The cloud account requires identity verification your children can’t satisfy because the recovery email points to an address only you could access. Photos that took a lifetime to accumulate disappear inside accounts that technically still exist but that nobody can open.

ASIC’s MoneySmart estate planning guidance focuses on the legal estate — wills, executors, beneficiaries — and those documents say nothing about a phone PIN or which cloud account holds the 2008–2014 photos. Your will appoints an executor; it doesn’t tell your eldest daughter that the wedding videos are on an external drive in the bottom drawer of the spare room, or that the journals are in a Google Docs folder under an account she’s never heard of. The instruction layer between “everything exists somewhere” and “your children can actually find it” is the gap.

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 asset category: what exists (photo library, journals, creative work, social accounts, voice notes), where it lives (which device, which cloud service, which external drive and where that drive is physically kept), who the account recovery contact is, and what you want to happen to it — archive to family, delete, or publish.

It does NOT hold your phone PIN, your Apple ID password, your Google account credentials, or any login. The Digital Legacy Vault holds instructions about what exists and how your adult children can find it — not your passwords, recovery codes, or device unlock PINs. Your children see the inventory you’ve prepared for them, only when you’ve released it.

This 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 clear of AUSTRAC reporting — and it’s also what means your children inherit guidance, not access tokens that may already be revoked by the time they need them. Under the Privacy Act, the personal information you record about your children (their names, contact details, the fact you’ve named them) is held and disclosed only on the release rules you set.

How it works

  1. You add each digital-legacy category to your vault — the iCloud photo library, the Google Drive journals folder, the external SSD in the study, the Instagram account, the voice notes app.
  2. For each entry you record where it lives, who at the service is listed as the account recovery contact, and your intended fate: archive to family, delete, or publish.
  3. You name your adult children as recipients for the digital legacy module and they accept (the vault records their consent).
  4. If something happens, your children are notified per your release rules and see only the digital legacy module — not your other modules unless you’ve released them too.
  5. Your children use the instructions to contact Apple, Google, or Meta’s legacy/deceased-user processes directly. The vault accelerates the finding and direction steps — it doesn’t bypass the platform’s identity checks.

Why this matters in Perth

Perth families are disproportionately spread out. Adult children frequently live in Melbourne, Sydney, London, or Singapore, and a death or capacity event means a sibling group trying to coordinate a Perth estate from four time zones. The device sitting locked on a Perth kitchen bench is the single point of failure. A clear instruction set — what exists, where it physically is, who at the cloud provider to contact, and what you want done with it — lets your children act from wherever they are instead of waiting for someone to fly home and guess at a PIN.

Sources

Join the waitlist

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

We’re opening waitlist access in tranches. Sign up to be notified when individuals in Perth 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 cloud passwords, and not your accounts themselves.