Ask HN: What are your digital end-of-life plans?

What I’ve done:

All of my passwords and passkeys are in Bitwarden. My brother has emergency access, and I’ve documented in Bitwarden Secure Notes my device credentials, recovery codes, estate information, and instructions for accessing my accounts.

One unresolved issue:

I have private photos of current romantic partners in my iOS Photos hidden album. I want my next of kin to be able to access the rest of my digital life, but I also want to protect those people’s privacy.

As far as I know, Apple doesn’t provide a way to grant next-of-kin access to an account while excluding hidden photos.

My current solution is a note asking my brother to delete the hidden photos before looking through the rest of my account. I trust him to do that, but I’d prefer a technical solution.

Is there a better approach?

For the unresolved photos issue; I am not an iOS user so not sure if there's any application to help you easily achieve that goal on that platform. But in general, you can encrypt the sensitive files themselves(either files or directory).

You'll lose the ability to easily and quickly look at the photos, as in a single click and you're in, but the process would achieve what you want. To view the photos, you can mount a decrypted version whenever you actually want to look at them and can automate some of this process if it is time consuming or you do it frequently. This is all much easier to do on a computer rather than a mobile a device.

On Linux, there's ecryptfs. There were a few other similar tools in various states of maturity and maintenance when I checked. Perhaps look into something similar for your platform.

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