Online Account Instructions for Your Partner: A Brisbane Parent’s Plan So the Kids’ Photos Don’t Disappear

You’re a parent in Brisbane. Between you and your partner there are roughly forty online accounts that matter — the shared Google account where ten years of the kids’ photos live, the iCloud backup of the baby videos, the email address every school and Medicare letter goes to, two password managers, a Facebook account that still has your mum’s last messages in it, and a Dropbox folder of birth certificates and scanned vaccination records. If something happened to you tomorrow, your partner would not know the full list. The plan is to leave them an inventory — what exists, who the provider is, what the username is — without ever handing over a password.

The problem

When someone dies in Australia, their online accounts don’t pause politely. Email inboxes keep receiving bills. Photo libraries keep auto-deleting under storage limits. Social accounts stay up, sometimes for years, because no one knew they existed. Each provider has its own deceased-user process — Google’s Inactive Account Manager, Apple’s Digital Legacy contacts, Meta’s memorialisation request — and each one requires the surviving partner to know the account existed in the first place and to have either a recovery contact set up or a death certificate plus identity documents. None of those processes will help your partner recover a Gmail account they didn’t know you had.

For Brisbane families with young children, the stakes are concrete: a decade of photos sitting in a cloud account no one can name. ASIC’s MoneySmart estate planning guidance frames wills around money and property, but most of what families actually grieve losing is the digital record — and a will doesn’t solve the access problem because providers respond to their own terms of service, not to probate.

What the Asset Instruction 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 online account: the provider name, the username or email identifier, whether you’ve set up a recovery contact or legacy contact with that provider, your account-closure preference (memorialise, delete, transfer ownership where possible), and notes on what’s stored there that matters — the kids’ photos, the tax records, the family group chat history.

The vault does NOT hold your passwords, your recovery codes, your 2FA seeds, or your password manager master password. The Digital Legacy Vault holds instructions about what exists and how your partner can find it — not your credentials, not your recovery phrases, not the contents of your accounts. That boundary is what keeps the vault outside the AFSL regime and outside AUSTRAC reporting: it’s an instructions register, not a financial product, not a custody service, and not advice.

How it works

  1. You add each significant online account to your vault — provider, username, account type, closure preference.
  2. For each provider that supports it (Google, Apple, Meta), you note whether you’ve configured their native legacy/recovery contact and who you set it to.
  3. You name your partner as the recipient for the online-accounts module and they accept (the vault records their consent under the Privacy Act’s notification principles).
  4. If something happens, your partner is notified per your release rules and sees only the online-accounts inventory you’ve prepared — not your other modules unless you’ve released them too.
  5. Your partner uses the inventory to contact each provider directly through that provider’s deceased-user process. The vault makes the enumeration problem solvable; the provider still runs their own verification.

Why this matters in Brisbane

Brisbane households skew toward dual-cloud families — one parent on Apple, one on Google, photos scattered across both, and a shared Dropbox or OneDrive for documents. That fragmentation is the exact pattern that defeats recovery. The most common failure mode we hear about isn’t a locked account; it’s an account no one knew to look for. A two-page inventory — provider, username, what’s in it, what to do with it — closes that gap before it opens. For parents specifically, the priority is usually the photo archive of the children: that’s the asset that can’t be reconstructed if a cloud account is closed for non-payment six months after a death.

Sources

Join the waitlist

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

We’re opening waitlist access in tranches. Sign up to be notified when parents in Brisbane can register their first online-accounts module. The Digital Legacy Vault holds instructions about what exists and how your partner can find it — not your passwords, not your recovery codes, and not the contents of your accounts.