What is Apple’s Digital Legacy and how do you use it?

Which of these do you trust?

The digital economy is a real economy and digital goods are real assets, but until now it has been hard to leave your electronic items to friends or relatives in the event you die. Apple has at last begun (but only begun) to address this problem with a new feature called Digital Legacy.

What is Digital Legacy?

Apple now lets you give a contact or contacts access to your iOS data if you die.

That person will need to prove they have the right to access this information, but will then be able to access your photos, emails, notes and other digital assets so they don’t disappear when you do. Digital Legacy will be available in iOS 15, iPadOS 15 and macOS Monterey.

What you can access

You can gain access to:

• Messages
• Mail
• Photos
• Videos
• Documents
• Notes
• Contacts
• Calendar events

What you can’t access

What Digital Legacy doesn’t do – and, in my opinion, it really should – is give those assigned people rights and access to your purchases, your music, movies, books and other assets die with you, despite the fact you already paid for them. The person you’ve given your data too also doesn’t get access to payment information, subscriptions or your Keychain.

How it works

The person you have assigned as your digital legate will be able to see your data on iCloud.com, download a copy of that data from privacy.apple.com or restore it from iCloud Backup. The activation lock will also be removed from devices. They will need to do so within a limited time window, once that date expires Apple will delete the data.

How to setup Digital Legacy

You can’t use this feature yet as you must wait until iOS 15 ships, once it does you’ll find it in the Password & Security section of Settings. Once you open that follow these steps:

• Choose Legacy Contact, which should be in the Account Recovery section.
• Tap Add Legacy Contact
• You’ll need to sign in using your Apple ID and password.
• You will then select the relevant contact to be your legacy contact.
• Once that’s done tap Continue and Apple generates an access key for your account, which your chosen contact will need to get to your data if you pass away.

Apple’s system will then prompt you to print your access key, which you should share with your contact and include in your will.

You can also easily delete contacts from Digital Legacy, if you no longer want them to have this access.

How to use Digital Legacy

If you are the chosen legacy contact for someone who has passed on you may still be able to unlock their device even if you lack the access key Apple generates. However, in order to gain such access you must provide proof of who you are and proof of the death of the person whose data you are trying to access.

How to download the access key

Tap the name of a contact you want to download the access key for. Tap View Acces Key and save it as a PDF, and send it to that contact.

Where can I find out more?

Apple has made its Digital Legacy tool available online, but while iOS 15 is available in beta it is unlikely this is completely functional at this time.

What needs to happen next

We need to be able to leave our music, movies and book collections to others after we die. We’ve paid for them, and can leave physical products, so it seems a poor deal not to be able to pass them on.

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