A generation ago, "going through someone's things" after they died meant physical drawers and filing cabinets. Today, a huge share of a person's life, conversations, photos, contacts, memories, exists only inside a locked phone and a handful of online accounts. Few people have thought about what actually happens to any of it when they are gone.
Facebook: memorialisation and Legacy Contact
Facebook is one of the few platforms with a real answer to this question. Family or friends can report a death, after which the account can be "memorialised," meaning the word "Remembering" appears next to the person's name and the account is preserved rather than deleted. If the account holder set up a Legacy Contact before they died, that person can manage certain memorialised-profile features, such as pinning a tribute post, though they still cannot log in as the deceased or read their private messages.
Google and Gmail: the Inactive Account Manager
Google offers a genuinely useful tool called Inactive Account Manager. You choose an inactivity period, for example three, six, or twelve months, and decide in advance what should happen: notify a trusted contact, share specific data like photos or emails with them, or have the account automatically deleted. Almost nobody sets this up, which means almost nobody's Gmail account has any plan at all by default.
WhatsApp: essentially no inheritance feature
WhatsApp is the starkest gap. There is no legacy contact, no memorialisation, and no formal process for a family to inherit or access an account. In practice, WhatsApp access depends entirely on physical access to the unlocked phone and control of the phone number's SIM, since WhatsApp ties an account to a phone number. Once the phone is locked and the SIM deactivated, years of conversations and shared photos are, in practice, gone.
Email accounts generally
Outside Google's specific tool, most email providers require a death certificate and legal documentation before releasing any access, and many simply do not offer account access to anyone, ever, only closure of the account on request. Families are often surprised to learn that "I'll just log into their email" is rarely as simple as it sounds, especially with two-factor authentication tied to the deceased's own phone.
What families can and cannot do without a password
- They generally cannot log into a locked phone, WhatsApp, or most email accounts without the passcode or an existing biometric setup.
- They can, on some platforms like Facebook and Google, request memorialisation or account action with a death certificate, but this is slow and platform-dependent.
- They cannot recover content platforms were never designed to hand over, no matter how legitimate the request.
How Remayn helps
This is precisely the gap Remayn was built to close for African families. Remayn's passive monitoring uses ordinary phone activity, including WhatsApp and app usage patterns, as a signal that you are safe, without ever reading your messages or accessing the accounts themselves. When you register your digital accounts with Remayn, you are not storing your live password; you are recording that the account exists and where access information is kept, so your next of kin knows what to look for and where to start, rather than discovering years of messages and memories are permanently out of reach because nobody ever wrote any of it down.
