Who looks after a TikTok when you die

This week a new line appeared in TikTok’s account settings. Social Media Today published the screenshots, taken from the app by researchers Radu Oncescu and Jonah Manzano: name another user as a “legacy contact”, or tell the platform to delete the profile after you die. MediaPost transcribed the prompt as “Choose someone you trust to manage your account after you pass away.” TikTok has not published a help article for the setting.

If you name someone, they can update the bio, accept friend requests, download copies of posts, change privacy settings and ask for the account to be deactivated. They cannot log in as you, or open the messages. The videos already posted stay as they were. Taking the account down still needs a family member or legal representative, a death certificate, and the company to be told. The setting does not watch for obituaries.

Facebook has offered a version of this since 2015. A memorialised profile gets the word Remembering beside the name. The posts stay, for whoever they were already shown to. Nobody signs in. If you never named a contact, Facebook says the memorialised profile cannot be changed at all. Apple’s Legacy Contact is a different tool: an access key, a death certificate, and a download of photos and notes — not the films you bought, and not the passwords sitting in iCloud Keychain.

What none of these tools quite admit is the size of the pile. In 2019 Carl Öhman and David Watson, at Oxford, projected that Facebook could hold 4.9 billion dead accounts by 2100 if it kept growing, or 1.4 billion even if nobody new joined. They were writing about one company. The same arithmetic now sits under every app that outlasts a person. A For You page is not a memorial. It is a feed that happened to be on. Keeping it is one kind of care. Deleting it is another, and plenty of families still get a relative who has never opened the app.

English law moved in December. The Property (Digital Assets etc) Act 2025, in force from the 2nd, says a thing can be personal property even if you cannot hold it and it is not a debt. Bitcoin can sit in an estate. Angharad Lynn, writing for the Law Society, draws the line the Act does not: email, cloud drives, social media, a Spotify library. Those are usually licences. They end. A statute that recognises crypto does not make TikTok hand a username to an executor. Logging into someone else’s account after they die, without the company’s authority, can be an offence under the Computer Misuse Act. The terms you clicked years ago still run the room.

Echoleft keeps a memorial private unless a family opens it. That is a place made on purpose, after someone has died. A TikTok is a place they already were. If the new setting is on your phone, it is still a setting: consider letting a loved one know when you've enabled it, along with your wishes for what they should do.