Meta Legacy Contact: what to set on Facebook

Meta Legacy Contact is a Facebook setting you choose while you are alive. You name a person who can take selected public actions on your main profile after the account is memorialized.

That means the setting should be treated as your decision about how someone else may handle your account after you are gone - not as a transfer of account access. Those are two different things.

What you choose on Facebook

In Facebook settings, you can name a person as your Legacy Contact. According to the Facebook Help Center, the setting matters after the profile has been memorialized.

Until then, the person you selected does not receive special access to your profile. Naming someone does not change how your account works during your lifetime.

What a person named as Legacy Contact can do

A person named as Legacy Contact can pin a post on the memorialized profile, update the profile picture and cover photo, respond to new friend requests, and ask Meta to remove the account.

If you turn on the relevant setting in advance, a person named as Legacy Contact may also download a copy of part of the account content. This means the scope defined by Facebook, not full private access to the account.

What the setting does not cover

A person named as Legacy Contact cannot log in to your account, read your messages, remove friends, or edit old posts. They do not receive your password.

This scope is worth knowing before you turn the feature on. Facebook Legacy Contact covers part of the public profile. It does not cover access to banks, email, cloud storage, subscriptions, documents, insurance policies, investment accounts, or other places where important information may sit.

Instagram uses a separate process

Instagram works differently. An Instagram account can be memorialized after someone submits a request to Meta with proof of death, such as a link to an obituary or a news article.

Meta also describes a separate process for removing the account of someone who has died. A verified immediate family member can ask Meta to remove the account and provide the required documents, such as a death certificate or proof that they represent the person's estate. These rules are described in the Instagram Help Center.

In practice, a Facebook decision does not automatically settle what happens on Instagram. If you want both accounts handled clearly, write down what should happen to your Facebook profile and what should happen to your Instagram account.

What to set while you can still decide

A simple plan has two layers. The first layer is the setting available inside a specific service, such as Facebook. The second layer is an instruction for the person who should know where to look after your death.

Where LegacyApp fits

Meta settings cover selected social media profiles. In LegacyApp, you can leave a wider instruction: which accounts exist, which documents matter, who should receive the information, and when they should receive it.

Your notes stay on your phone and as an encrypted copy in your own Google Drive or iCloud. They do not go to LegacyApp servers, and the app operator has no access to the content of your notes. The app checks from time to time whether everything is okay; if you stop responding, the person you selected, with confirmation from your trusted people, can receive secure access to the information you chose to share.