Indiana Injury And Family Lawyer BlogHow Indiana Law Decides Who Can Access Your Digital Assets After Death or Incapacity
Most people now keep a meaningful part of their lives online: email, photographs, bank and brokerage logins, social media, cloud storage, and increasingly digital currency. Far fewer have thought about what happens to those accounts if they die or lose the ability to manage their own affairs. Indiana answers that question through a statute on access to digital assets, the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act. Knowing how it works, and how to plan around it, can spare your family a frustrating stretch of locked accounts at an already hard time.
The law sets out who may reach your digital assets and under what conditions. The part that surprises people is that a will or power of attorney, on its own, often is not the deciding factor. A provider’s own tools and policies can carry more weight than the documents you signed with an attorney, unless you take a specific step the statute recognizes.
How Indiana’s Digital Assets Law Works
The Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act, adopted in Indiana in 2016 and codified at Indiana Code Article 32-39, governs access by four kinds of fiduciaries: the personal representative of a deceased person’s estate, an agent acting under a power of attorney, a trustee, and a court-appointed guardian. The statute lets these fiduciaries request access to digital assets from the company that holds them, which the law calls the custodian.
Indiana law builds a clear order of priority for deciding access, set out in Indiana Code 32-39-2-1. At the top is an online tool. If the provider offers a feature that lets you name someone to receive or manage your account after death or incapacity, and you use it, that choice controls. Google’s Inactive Account Manager and Apple’s Legacy Contact are common examples. A direction you give through one of these tools overrides instructions in your estate documents and overrides the provider’s general terms of service.
If you have not used an online tool, the next level is your estate planning documents. Directions in a will, trust, or power of attorney about disclosure of digital assets come next in priority. Only if you have done neither does the provider’s terms-of-service agreement govern, and those agreements frequently restrict or block fiduciary access.
This priority order is the practical heart of the statute. The choice you make inside an account can quietly outrank the will you spent time and money preparing. That is not a flaw to fear so much as a feature to use deliberately.
What Your Personal Representative or Agent Can Actually Reach
Indiana’s statute draws a line between the contents of your electronic communications and everything else. The contents of communications, meaning the actual text of your emails and messages, receive the strongest protection. A custodian will disclose those contents to a personal representative only when the deceased user consented, either through an online tool or in a will or other record, as provided in Indiana Code 32-39-2-4. Without that consent, the contents stay private.
Other digital assets, such as a catalogue of whom you communicated with, account balances, files, and similar information, are available on a lower showing. A custodian may disclose this broader category to a personal representative unless the user directed otherwise. The same content-versus-catalogue distinction runs through the provisions that govern an agent acting under a power of attorney.
For an agent under a power of attorney, the document matters a great deal. Authority over the content of communications must be granted expressly in the power of attorney. A general grant of authority will not reach it. This is the kind of detail that turns a routine task, paying a bill from an online account or closing a dormant subscription, into a wall the family cannot get past. Financial institutions in particular can be cautious about granting access, a pattern I have written about before in connection with bank verification and estate administration.
Steps That Keep Accounts From Locking Up
A few concrete moves make a real difference, and none of them are complicated.
Start with the online tools. Where a provider offers a legacy or inactive-account feature, use it and name the person you want. That single step sits at the top of Indiana’s priority order and resolves access for that account without any court involvement.
Next, make sure your estate planning documents speak to digital assets directly. A current will, trust, and durable power of attorney should each include language authorizing your fiduciary to access digital assets, including the content of electronic communications where you want that access granted. The statute gives your written directions real force, but only if the documents actually contain them. Many older documents predate the law entirely and say nothing on the subject.
Keep an inventory of your accounts, stored securely and apart from your passwords. A fiduciary cannot ask for access to an account no one knows exists. A simple list of providers, updated now and then, saves enormous effort later. I generally advise against writing passwords into a will, since a will becomes a public record once it is filed with the court.
Revisit all of this when your circumstances change. New accounts, a new financial institution, or a move to a different platform each give you a reason to confirm that your plan still reaches everything it should.
Digital assets are easy to overlook until a family runs into a locked account with no clear way in. A short review can confirm that your will, trust, and power of attorney are written to work with Indiana’s digital assets law rather than against it. Attorney Burton Padove brings nearly forty years of Indiana estate planning experience to that kind of review, and Padove Law offers free, in-home consultations throughout the state. To make sure the people you trust can reach what they need to, call the office at (219) 836-2200 and arrange a time to go over your plan.