What Your Executor Can't Do Without Your Passwords

An executor with a valid court appointment can compel a Canadian bank to talk to them. They cannot compel a photo library to hand over twenty years of family pictures, and they usually cannot get into an email account at all. Legal authority and digital access are two different things, and in Canada the gap between them is wide.

Why authority isn't access

Most of the services a Canadian household uses every day are operated by companies outside Canada, under terms of service that treat an account as non-transferable and personal. Some have a legacy or inactive-account process. Many don't. Even where a process exists, it typically produces an archive of data rather than the ability to sign in and act.

That means an executor holding a Certificate of Appointment or a Grant of Probate can still be told no by a service that holds something the family desperately wants.

The email account is the real key

Almost every other account can be recovered through a password reset sent to an email address. Which makes the email account the single most important credential in a person's digital life — and the one most likely to be protected by two-factor authentication tied to a phone that has been cancelled.

What tends to be lost outright

• Cryptocurrency held in a self-custody wallet. No seed phrase, no recovery — there is no institution to appeal to.
• Photos and videos stored only in a cloud account with no other copy.
• Two-factor backup codes, which are usually generated once and never written down.
• Password managers protected by a master password known to one person.
• Loyalty and travel points, some of which are transferable to an estate and some of which are simply cancelled.
• Small business assets: domain names, hosting, payment processors and the customer list.

What to write down now

1. 1The email addresses you actually use, and which accounts depend on each one.
2. 2How your two-factor authentication works, and where the backup codes are kept.
3. 3Whether you use a password manager, which one, and how a trusted person could reach it.
4. 4Any cryptocurrency, the wallet type, and where the recovery phrase is stored — never in an email or a photo.
5. 5Subscriptions that will keep billing, so the estate isn't paying for streaming for a year.
6. 6What you'd like done with your social accounts: memorialized, closed, or left alone.

Sharing without handing over the keys today

The instinct to write passwords on a sheet in a drawer is understandable and genuinely risky — that sheet is readable by anyone who opens the drawer, including a contractor or a house guest. The safer version is a system where credentials are encrypted, where nobody has access while you're alive and well, and where release happens only after a person's authority has been checked by a human being.

That is exactly the problem Life Box is built around. Documents and credentials are stored separately, credentials are encrypted, and access is only released to a representative whose authority has been verified — not to whoever happens to ask.

General information for Canadian households, not legal advice. Terms of service change, and a lawyer can advise on your specific estate.