Your life is in accounts that end when you do

For most of history a life left physical residue: letters in a drawer, albums on a shelf, documents in a box that somebody eventually opened. None of it needed permission to read. It degraded slowly, visibly, and in ways an ordinary person could understand.

Almost none of that is true now. What a person leaves is spread across services they rented access to, under terms they did not read, tied to credentials that die with them.

The four ways it disappears

The account closes. Most services terminate access on death or on inactivity. Some have legacy mechanisms; most do not, and the ones that exist have to be configured in advance by somebody thinking about their own death, which is not a large group.

The company ends. Services shut down, get acquired, change direction. Sometimes there is an export window and an announcement; often there is not, and the notice period is measured against a business calendar rather than a human one.

The credentials are gone. Even where access is legally inheritable, it is practically gatekept by a password nobody else has. Families end up negotiating with support desks, which is a slow way to discover that a policy is not a person.

Nobody knows it is there. The most common outcome, and the quietest. Material survives perfectly well in a storage account nobody remembers exists, and gets deleted for non-payment three years later.

Why terms of service are the wrong instrument

A terms-of-service agreement is a licence to use a service. It is not a custody arrangement, it carries no obligation of permanence, and it can be changed unilaterally with notice. This is entirely reasonable for what those services are — nobody signed up to a photo app expecting a hundred-year commitment.

The mistake is on the other side: treating an ordinary consumer service as an archive because it happens to be where the material ended up. That is not what it was built for, and no amount of paid storage tier changes the underlying arrangement.

What custody actually requires

A copy you hold. Not access to a copy. Something on media you control, in formats you can open without permission from anyone.

Somebody who knows. A person who knows the archive exists, where it is and how to open it. Written down, because the knowledge is worth as much as the material.

Rules that survive you. Who may see what, from when, decided while you are here to decide it, and recorded with the material rather than as a setting in an interface.

A named successor for the container itself. Not just the contents — whoever holds the archive also needs a successor, because that is the part that fails silently.

The uncomfortable version of the question

Every archive faces the same question, including ours: what happens to this when the organisation holding it stops existing? Institutions built for permanence — national archives, libraries, endowed foundations — have answers that are hundreds of years old. Technology companies mostly have a runway.

Asking that question is the single most useful thing anybody can do about their own material, and the answer they get says more than any feature list. If a service cannot answer it in writing, what they are offering is storage, and storage is not the same as keeping.