Apple Digital Legacy Service Lets Users Choose Heirs For Their iCloud Data After Death

Apple is adding a Digital Legacy feature that allows users to nominate contacts as legacy contacts who will be granted access to their Apple account in the event of their demise.

For years, users and campaigners have lobbied the tech giant to implement a formalised method of accessing emails, photos, and other contents of a loved one’s iCloud account after their death.

Up until now, the company had only advised users to include access to their personal information in their will:

“We encourage customers to add an inheritance plan to their will that covers the personal information they store on their devices and in iCloud. This may simplify the process of acquiring a proper court order and reduce delay and frustration for family members during a difficult time.”

With Digital Legacy, that process is both simplified and formalised; Legacy contacts will use a “legacy contact Apple ID” to sign in. The user will have access to the iCloud data and will be able to download it using the ID and access key.  Once logged in, the legacy contact user must provide a valid copy of the primary user’s death certificate in order to gain access to the deceased person’s data.

It should be pointed out that Facebook has had a Legacy contact feature for years. In the case of the social network, its Legacy contacts feature is in charge of memorialised accounts or offers users the choice of having their account deleted after Facebook is informed of your death.

It should be noted that for Apple’s Digital Legacy service, payment information such as credit card details, subscriptions, licensed media, and Keychain password will be excluded from the accessible data.

Apple iCloud Experiences Activation and Sign-In Issues Throughout Christmas Weekend

Gift-giving is a long-standing Christmas tradition. However, for those who were lucky enough to have received Apple product as a present for this year’s Christmas, sounds like your experience might have hampered a little bit.

According to the System Status page on Apple’s website, the Account & Sign In services for iCloud were disrupted on Christmas Day at 5:45 PM Malaysian time although other services within iCloud were not affected. Apple Insider reported that the service disruption has messed up the device activation process for some Apple products including iPhone, Apple Watch, and HomePod.

In addition to that, some users also experienced longer waiting times to set up their iCloud account and devices while there were also users that couldn’t even get any of these to work at all. While Apple didn’t reveal the true nature of the disruption, the company did admit on Twitter that it was facing “a high capacity” which possibly means that Apple’s iCloud servers were handling more requests than usual.

Almost 36 hours after it happened, Apple finally managed to fix the issue at 5:35 AM our time according to the latest notice on its System Status webpage. So, if you were not able to set up your new Apple products that you received on Christmas Day, you might want to try again right now before sending them over to the nearest Apple Authorized Service Providers.