California’s digital-asset law changed in 2025 and most estate plans haven’t caught up.
Picture a family eleven months into trying to recover a decade of photographs. Not from a fire — from a phone. The phone is locked. The cloud account will happily send a verification code, to that same phone. And the company on the other end has a policy, not a heart.
Somewhere in that house is a will. A good one. It names an executor, divides things fairly, and says absolutely nothing about the account holding every picture of the grandkids.
That gap has a name now, and California has been quietly closing it.
What the law actually does
In 2016, California adopted the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act. It gives the person handling your affairs a legal path to your digital life, and it sets a clear order of priority.
First in line: whatever you told the platform yourself. Most of the big services now offer a built-in tool — Apple’s Legacy Contact, Google’s Inactive Account Manager, Facebook’s legacy contact — and if you use one, that instruction controls. If you haven’t, your will, trust, or power of attorney speaks next. If both are silent, then the company’s terms-of-service agreement decides, and those agreements were not written with your family in mind.
What changed in 2025
For its first eight years, the law addressed what happens after someone dies. It left a real hole in the middle: the stroke, the accident, the diagnosis — the long stretch where someone is still very much here but is incapacitated and can’t manage their own accounts.
A new law closed that gap effective January 1, 2025, so that it now reaches agents acting under a power of attorney and court-appointed conservators.
Here’s the part worth reading twice: a custodian releases the contents of your emails and messages to your agent only if your power of attorney expressly grants that authority. Most powers of attorney signed before 2025 simply don’t contain that language. They weren’t wrong when they were drafted. The law changed.
And one limit no statute can fix: none of this obligates a company to hand over your passwords or unlock your devices.
Three things worth doing this month
1. Turn on the tools. Twenty minutes in your settings, on each major account, outranks everything else in the hierarchy.
2. Make a map, not a password list. Where the accounts live, who should reach them, what you’d want done. Never a document full of passwords.
3. Read the digital-asset paragraph in your own documents. If your power of attorney predates 2025, ask whether it says what the new law now requires.
Your estate plan was built to pass along a house, a bank account, a wedding ring. It’s worth asking what it says about the twelve years of photographs — because someone will be holding your phone, and the kindest thing you can leave them is a way in.
M. Cecilia Amo, Esq. is an estate planning attorney at AMO LAW Legacy Planning. This article is general information, not legal advice, and does not create an attorney-client relationship.
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