A Jacksonville business owner named her father's estate's personal representative and assumed the will settled everything. It did not. When she tried to reach his email to close accounts, download the family photos in his cloud storage, and recover a meaningful balance sitting in a crypto exchange, every provider said no. The will named her, but it did not authorize any of them to grant her access — and the exchange demanded a court order she did not have. Months of probate friction later, the crypto's two-factor code was still tied to a phone the carrier had already shut off.
This is the gap almost every traditional estate plan leaves open. A will disposes of your property, but the contents of your digital accounts are governed by federal privacy law and provider terms of service, not by the four corners of your will. After 30 years of practice, here are the six digital assets a standard Florida will leaves your executor locked out of — and how the Florida Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act closes each one.
1. Email Accounts
Email is the master key to a digital life — password resets, financial statements, bill notices, and correspondence all funnel through it. But the contents of a stored email are protected under the federal Stored Communications Act. A provider that discloses them without authority faces its own liability, so the default answer to a grieving family is a flat refusal.
Your executor needs explicit authorization to access the content of communications, not just the account itself. That authorization has to appear in the estate-planning documents or through the provider's own online tool. Without it, the executor may get the account frozen and eventually closed, but never opened.
2. Cloud Storage and Photos
A lifetime of family photographs, documents, and files often lives in iCloud, Google Photos, or Dropbox and nowhere else. These have real sentimental and sometimes financial value, but they sit behind the same privacy wall as email. Apple, for example, will not simply hand over an account on request; it points to its Legacy Contact tool or requires a court order.
The practical loss here is quiet and permanent. No one sues over lost photos, so families rarely fight it — they simply lose the archive. A designated legacy contact set up while you are living is the difference between a five-minute download and a gone-forever folder.
3. Cryptocurrency and Exchange Accounts
Crypto is where the digital-access problem gets expensive. A balance on a hosted exchange like Coinbase is a digital asset your fiduciary can claim — but only with proper authority, and often only after clearing the exchange's own probate process. Self-custodied crypto in a hardware or software wallet is worse: if no one has the seed phrase, the assets are unrecoverable by anyone, forever. No court order can regenerate a lost private key.
Crypto needs two things that people confuse for one: the legal authority for a fiduciary to control it, and a secure access plan so the keys survive you without exposing them while you are alive. A will that grants authority but leaves the seed phrase in your head has solved half the problem and lost the assets anyway.
4. Social Media and Content Accounts
Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and similar platforms hold both memories and, for creators, real income. Each has its own after-death policy: Facebook offers memorialization and a Legacy Contact; Google routes through Inactive Account Manager. A monetized channel or a following built over a decade is an asset — but the platform's terms, not your will, decide what happens to it unless you use the tools the platform provides.
For anyone earning revenue through a platform, this is not sentimental — it is a business succession question hiding inside a personal account.
5. Subscriptions, Loyalty, and Financial Apps
Auto-renewing subscriptions keep charging a closed estate's card. Airline miles, hotel points, and credit-card rewards can carry thousands of dollars in value, and many programs allow transfer at death — but only if someone knows the account exists and acts before the program cancels it. PayPal, Venmo, and similar balances are money your executor has to find before they can collect it.
The recurring theme is discovery. Your executor cannot claim, cancel, or transfer an account they never knew you had. A current inventory does more work here than any legal clause.
6. Business Logins and Domains
For a business owner, the digital-access gap can freeze the whole operation. The domain name, the website host, the online storefront, the payment processor, the email marketing list, and the SaaS tools that run the business are all gated behind credentials. If those live only with the owner, the business can stall the moment the owner is incapacitated — not even dead, just unavailable.
This is why digital-asset authority belongs in the durable power of attorney too, not only the will. Incapacity is more common than death, and it arrives without warning. A fiduciary who can step in while you are alive can keep a business breathing; one who has to wait for probate often cannot.
The Fix: Florida's Three-Tier Priority System
Florida's Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act (Chapter 740, Florida Statutes) sets a clear order of authority, and understanding it tells you exactly what to do:
First, the online tool. If a provider offers a tool to name who gets access — Google's Inactive Account Manager, Apple's Legacy Contact, Facebook's Legacy Contact — that designation controls above everything else, including your will. Setting these takes minutes and outranks every document you sign.
Second, your estate-planning documents. Where no online tool is set, an explicit grant of digital-asset authority in your will, trust, and durable power of attorney controls. This is the language a general, older will almost never contains.
Third, the terms of service. If you did nothing, the provider's default policy governs — which usually means your fiduciary gets little or nothing without a court fight.
A complete digital estate plan works all three tiers at once: it sets the online-tool designations, writes the authority into the documents, and maintains a secure inventory so the fiduciary can act. For the broader picture of how digital assets fit alongside a traditional plan, see why a modern Florida estate plan needs both the physical and digital sides. For the specific case of accounts with hidden value, see digital estate planning for gamers and virtual assets.
What to Do This Week
You do not need a lawyer to set an online-tool designation — do that today for your email and phone ecosystem. You do need proper drafting to grant digital-asset authority in your will and power of attorney, because the language has to track the statute to work. And you need an inventory that is secure while you are living and findable when you are not. The three together are what keep your executor from hitting the wall the business owner above walked into.