ALKHOBAR: Two-factor authentication and hardware-level encryption are built to withstand state-sponsored hackers. They are not built for grieving daughters.
And following the death of her father, Nora Al-Salem discovered that the very security features protecting his phone had turned his legacy into an impenetrable black box.
She and her siblings sat down to sort through the physical traces of his life. His paper documents were neatly filed away but the real heart of his legacy — thousands of irreplaceable family photographs, personal videos, and voice notes — was not. It was trapped behind the sleek, dark screen of a smartphone the family could no longer unlock.
“We knew his passcode before, but he had changed it a few months earlier,” Al-Salem told Arab News. “At first, we thought it wasn’t a big issue. Then we realized how much was actually on that phone.”
Locked inside were precious snapshots from forgotten family trips, priceless audio recordings of deceased relatives and crucial documents her father had never saved anywhere else.
As the physical world recedes and human existence increasingly migrates behind layers of complex passwords, grieving families are colliding head-on with a surreal secondary crisis: navigating the digital ghosts left behind. Today, a single handheld device houses decades of intimate messages and family archives right alongside active software subscriptions, hidden cloud files, commercial assets and creative works.
Making matters worse, accessing even a single account often triggers a domino effect of security hurdles, requiring access to linked email addresses, secondary phone numbers, or two-factor authentication apps.
Yet for Al-Salem’s family, breaking into her father’s private life was never the goal.
“We weren’t trying to read his private conversations,” she said. “We just wanted the family photographs. Some of them don’t exist anywhere else.”
The family launched a frantic effort to piece together what had been backed up or previously circulated in group chats.
“That was when we realized there isn’t just one password,” she said. “There is the phone, his email, the cloud account, [and] applications. Everything depends on something else.”
While they managed to retrieve a handful of photos from relatives' devices, an entire vault of family history remains hopelessly out of reach.
“I wish we had talked about it before,” Al-Salem said. “You talk about bank accounts and documents, but nobody thinks to ask: What happens to your phone?”
Unprotected digital empires
It is an unsettling question that Saudi entrepreneur Reem Al-Harbi, 29, completely overlooked.
Al-Harbi runs a small online accessories brand. Her entire commercial operation — customer registries, overseas supplier contacts, and product catalogs — is spread across Instagram, WhatsApp, personal emails and cloud drives.
When asked who could step in and run the business if she died, she went silent.
“My sister knows roughly how the business works, but she doesn’t have the passwords,” Al-Harbi told Arab News. “I never really thought about someone needing them.”
Her core business email relies on two-factor authentication tied directly to her personal mobile. Supplier invoices are buried deep within inbox threads, while crucial customer histories exist exclusively inside encrypted messaging streams.
“If something happened to me today, they would probably have my phone but wouldn’t know where everything is,” she said, adding with a sigh: “I actually don’t think they would even know all the subscriptions I’m paying for.”
The single point of failure
Cybersecurity specialist Abdullah Al-Dossari warns that this digital logjam occurs because modern lives are built around dangerous single points of failure.
“If one person’s mobile number is the recovery method for the company email, social media account and cloud storage, that person has effectively become a single point of failure,” Al-Dossari told Arab News.
While rigorous authentication protocols keep cybercriminals at bay during life, they build an impenetrable brick wall for grieving families after death. Modern device encryption only deepens the deadlock.
“People sometimes assume that if they have the physical phone, somebody can simply unlock it for them,” Al-Dossari said. “Technically, that may not be possible in the way they expect.”
Yet writing down every credential on a piece of paper carries its own risks.
“If you create one document containing access to your entire digital life and someone obtains it while you’re alive, you have created a very valuable target,” Al-Dossari warned.
To soften this digital deadlock, tech titans have begun rolling out posthumous controls. Apple’s Legacy Contact feature allows users to appoint trusted individuals to request account access post-mortem. Google’s Inactive Account Manager automatically dispatches or erases data after prolonged silence, while Meta offers avenues to memorialize or delete profiles.
Privacy, secrets and AI
The explosion of artificial intelligence has added a fascinating, fraught dimension to digital estates. Chatbots have become intimate sounding boards where users draft work, upload internal documents, map out business ideas and confess anxieties they would never voice out loud. A single AI log can contain a goldmine of intellectual property alongside deeply private thoughts.
For Al-Salem, seeking access to her father’s device was never about uncovering secrets.
“There are things that belonged to him,” she said. “I don’t need to know every conversation he had.”
Al-Dossari emphasizes that people must audit their digital lives today — separating critical enterprise networks from personal devices and activating legacy controls.
The wake-up call is already prompting real-world changes.
“I have plans for the business, but I never had a plan for what happens to it without me,” Al-Harbi admitted.
Al-Salem, meanwhile, has taken decisive action to ensure her own legacy is not lost to the cloud. She has audited her files, established a shared family archive and set clear boundaries for her personal life.
“Some things I want my family to have,” she said. “Some things are just mine.”
This time, she has ensured the right keys are in the right hands.
