Korean law has little to say about the accounts you leave behind
Platforms have built their own rules for the profiles, photos and messages of dead users, and in the absence of a Korean statute on digital inheritance those private policies are effectively the governing law.
When a Korean dies, the disposition of their bank accounts, property and debts is handled by inheritance law refined over a century, and the state runs a consolidated service letting an heir discover what financial accounts existed. The disposition of their email, photographs, messaging history and social profiles is handled by the terms of service of a handful of companies. That asymmetry is the whole subject, and it is less a deliberate legislative choice than a gap that has stayed open through several attempts to close it.
The platforms filled it first, and their approaches diverge in ways that matter. Meta’s services allow an account to be memorialized rather than deleted, freezing it as a place for others to post while blocking logins, and permit a user to designate a legacy contact with narrow powers. Google offers an inactive account manager that lets a user specify, while alive, who should be notified after a period of inactivity and what data they may download. Apple added a legacy contact mechanism in late 2021 giving a nominated person access to much of an iCloud account with a death certificate and an access key. All three privilege the user’s own prior instruction over the family’s later request, which is a defensible principle and one most users never exercise, because nobody configures their afterlife at twenty-eight.
Korean domestic platforms have generally taken a narrower line. The major portals and messengers have provided bereaved families limited assistance — typically some ability to obtain content the deceased had posted publicly, or to have an account closed — while declining to hand over private messages or full account access. The reasoning is sound and rarely stated plainly: a message thread involves at least two people, and the survivor’s privacy interest in it does not lapse because the other party died.
The legal position underneath is thinner than most people assume. Korean inheritance law transfers property rights and obligations, and some digital assets fall cleanly inside that — a game item with market value, a cryptocurrency holding, an advertising account with a balance. Access to an account is not itself a property right; it is a contractual relationship, and platform terms routinely prohibit transfer. Personal information law is built around living individuals, so the deceased’s own data protection claim ends at death while the data continues to exist and to describe other living people. Bills addressing digital inheritance have been introduced repeatedly in the National Assembly since around 2010, prompted initially by bereaved families seeking access to the accounts of relatives lost in a public disaster, and they have consistently lapsed without passage.
Running alongside is the separate and better-developed argument about the right to be forgotten. Korea’s data protection authority launched a service in 2023 allowing young people to request deletion of content they themselves posted as minors, establishing that the state accepts some responsibility for helping people remove their own past from the internet. Extending that logic to the dead is not straightforward, because the person with the interest cannot assert it, and the family’s wishes and the deceased’s likely wishes frequently conflict.
The practical consequence falls on families at the worst possible moment. Bereaved relatives typically discover the problem while trying to close a subscription or retrieve photographs that exist nowhere else, and find that the recovery path runs through a support queue, a foreign company’s evidentiary requirements, and sometimes a translated court document. Many simply use the password they already knew, which resolves the immediate problem by quietly violating the terms and settles nothing.
The most useful step available is unglamorous and does not require legislation. The tools already exist on the largest platforms, they are free, they take a few minutes, and they are almost entirely unused. A statute defining what happens by default would be better. Until there is one, the default is whatever a support team decides.