In the days following a death, there is one object nobody quite knows what to do with. It is neither a piece of furniture nor an administrative document: it is a phone. It sits on a table, it still buzzes from time to time — an appointment reminder, an advert, a friend who hasn't been told — and it holds years of conversations.
Relatives tend to split between two opposing instincts. Some want to read everything, keep everything, print out the last messages. Others don't dare unlock the screen, as though they were forcing a door open. Both are onto something: a deceased person's text messages are an ambiguous legal object, sitting on the border between intimate keepsake and protected correspondence.
In France, this question does have an answer — a partial one, scattered across the Civil Code, the 2016 Digital Republic Act and the GDPR — but it exists. Here is what the law actually permits, what carriers keep or destroy, and how to avoid the technical mistakes that make recovery permanently impossible.
A founding principle: text messages are not personal property
The first surprise, for many families, is that a deceased person's messages are not part of the estate in the classic sense of the term.
Article 40-1 of the French Data Protection Act (loi Informatique et Libertés), as worded following the Digital Republic Act of 7 October 2016, sets out a clear rule: rights over personal data are extinguished upon the death of the data subject. They are not passed on to heirs the way a house or a bank account would be.
In other words: inheriting the phone as an object does not automatically grant the right to make use of what it contains. The smartphone is a movable asset; the conversation it houses is not.
To this is added a second, older protection: the privacy of correspondence, guaranteed by Article 226-15 of the Criminal Code. Opening, deleting or intercepting someone else's correspondence is an offence. Case law has long held that this protection also covers the living sender and recipient of an exchange — and a deceased person's messages almost always involve third parties who are still alive.
Keep the distinction in mind: you can inherit the phone. You do not inherit the right to read the messages as though they had been addressed to you.
This nuance is not theoretical. It explains why a carrier will refuse to hand over a detailed history, why Apple or Google demand specific documents, and why a family dispute over a phone sometimes ends up before a judge.
Post-mortem directives: the only real user manual
The 2016 act created a tool that remains far too little known: post-mortem directives. Any adult can decide, during their lifetime, what will become of their personal data after their death.
These directives can be:
- general, covering all data, and registered with a trusted third party certified by the CNIL;
- specific, covering a particular service (a Google account, an Apple account, a messaging service), and lodged directly with that service.
They make it possible to appoint someone to carry out these wishes: to consult, to pass on, or conversely to have the data deleted. In the absence of directives, the law provides that heirs may exercise certain rights, but within a restricted framework — essentially to settle the estate and to have the death taken into account (closing accounts, updating records, objecting to processing).
The CNIL sets out this framework in detail on its website and points out that no heir can claim a "general right of access" to the content of a deceased person's correspondence.
In practice, two services account for the bulk of French text messages, and each offers its own mechanism:
| Ecosystem | Available tool | What it allows |
|---|---|---|
| Apple | Legacy Contact | Access to the deceased's iCloud data, including backups containing text messages, on presentation of an access key and a death certificate |
| Inactive Account Manager | Automatic transfer of selected data to designated contacts after a period of inactivity, or deletion of the account |
Setting up these tools takes about ten minutes. Failing to set them up turns a simple process into a lengthy procedure, sometimes a judicial one. On iPhones, the Legacy Contact is configured in the Apple account settings; with Google, the Inactive Account Manager is found in the account's security settings.
What the carrier keeps — and what it doesn't
This is one of the most common misunderstandings. Many families write to Orange, SFR, Bouygues or Free hoping to obtain "the text messages" of the deceased. The answer is almost always no, for a simple technical reason.
French carriers do not store the content of text messages. A message passes through the message centre (SMSC), stays there only as long as needed for delivery — a few hours to a few days if the phone is switched off — then is erased from the system. What is kept is a technical log: calling and called numbers, date, time, possibly the cell used. These are the well-known connection metadata, retained under the French Postal and Electronic Communications Code for one year within the framework laid down by French and European law.
And those data are accessible neither to heirs nor to relatives: they can only be requisitioned by a judicial authority, as part of an investigation.
In concrete terms, this means one thing: if the messages are not on the phone or in a backup, they no longer exist anywhere. No administrative step will make them reappear. This reality should shape everything that is done in the first few days.
The mistakes that destroy messages for good
Time works against the family, and the most damaging mistakes are made with the best of intentions.
Cancelling the line too quickly
The natural reflex is to stop the direct debits. But cancelling the line releases the number, which will be reassigned to another subscriber after a quarantine period. Yet that number is often the recovery key for online accounts (two-factor authentication by text message). It is generally better to suspend the line, or keep it for a few months while the estate is settled, then cancel it — most carriers allow cancellation free of charge on presentation of a death certificate.
Letting the battery run completely flat
A smartphone left discharged for weeks and then recharged may ask again for a full unlock code (and not merely a fingerprint or face recognition). On iPhone as on Android, after a restart only the PIN or the password will work. If nobody knows it, the device becomes inaccessible. Keeping the device plugged into a USB-C mains charger from the very first days avoids this dead end.
Trying codes at random
After several failed attempts, an iPhone imposes increasing delays, then a lockout. On Android, certain settings trigger an automatic wipe after a set number of failures. Never improvise: better to look for the code written down somewhere than to play guessing games.
Resetting the phone "to give it away"
A factory reset is irreversible. It erases local messages and, under certain settings, triggers the deletion of associated backups. Before giving away or reselling the device, a complete copy must be made.
Preserving the messages: the careful method
When access is possible and legitimate — the device is unlocked, the family agrees, the aim is to preserve a keepsake or settle the estate — it is better to proceed properly than to photograph the screen haphazardly.
1. Freeze the state of the device. Switching on airplane mode prevents an incoming message, a sync or a remote deletion from altering the content. That is the first thing to do.
2. Make a full backup. On iPhone, an encrypted backup to a computer includes SMS and iMessages. On Android, the export depends on the app used; Google Messages allows a backup linked to the Google account. A copy on a portable external hard drive, kept offline, is worth more than a cloud whose access will one day depend on a forgotten password.
3. Extract the conversations that matter. Rather than printing everything, select the threads that are genuinely meaningful. Some relatives choose to have the most important exchanges bound; others settle for a PDF export. A portable document scanner can help to digitise printouts or related letters cleanly, to build a coherent whole.
4. Document the process. Note who accessed the device, when, and why. In the event of disagreement between heirs, this traceability protects whoever acted in good faith.
5. Respect third parties. The conversations contain the words of other living people. Widely circulating private exchanges — in a family group chat, on social media — can expose whoever publishes them to liability. Discretion is not merely a courtesy: it is a legal precaution.
When a text message becomes part of a case file
There are situations in which a deceased person's messages are no longer a matter of remembrance but of law.
- Inheritance dispute: a text message can shed light on an intention to make a gift, a loan between relatives, a promise. It does not replace a will, but it can constitute prima facie written evidence, assessed at the judge's discretion.
- Investigating the cause of death: accident, suspected homicide, harassment. Here, only criminal procedure counts. Relatives must report the existence of the phone to investigators without touching it, and above all delete nothing: destroying evidence can carry criminal liability.
- Fraud targeting the deceased: it is not unusual for an elderly person to have fallen victim to smishing or aggressive cold-calling in their final months. Saved messages then make it possible to report the numbers to 33700, the national SMS spam reporting service, and to support a complaint.
- Post-mortem impersonation: death notices published online sometimes feed campaigns targeting those close to the deceased. A text message announcing bogus "funeral administration fees" to be paid urgently is a classic scam. No reputable funeral provider ever demands payment via a link sent by text message.
Organising your own digital legacy
The most useful lesson from these situations is preventive. A few decisions taken calmly spare grieving relatives a second ordeal.
Write down your wishes. A simple, dated document setting out what you want: preservation, transfer to a specific person, or outright deletion. It can be lodged with a notary or slipped in with your important papers. A paper password notebook, stored in a safe place, remains the most robust way to pass on an unlock code without circulating it by messaging app.
Appoint a contact. Legacy Contact on the Apple side, Inactive Account Manager on the Google side: these two settings cover the bulk of a French user's messages.
Physically secure the access points. For those who use a password manager, set up an emergency recovery procedure. A physical FIDO2 security key, kept with your official documents, makes it possible to entrust access without revealing a password during your lifetime.
Plan ahead for the mobile line. State which number serves as a second authentication factor, and for which accounts. This is the information that is almost always missing, and the one that blocks the most procedures.
Sort things out while you're alive. Nothing requires you to keep ten years of conversations. A deliberate, selective archive on an encrypted medium shows more respect for everyone than a mass of data left behind as a legacy.
Key takeaways
Text messages hold a particular place in our lives: more intimate than an email, more lasting than a phone call. Their transmission after a death does not follow the rules of a classic inheritance, but a regime of its own, built around two ideas: respect for the wishes of the deceased, and protection of the correspondents who are still alive.
Three reflexes are enough to cover most situations. Rush nothing — no cancellation, no reset, no attempts at guessing codes. Back up before sorting, and do it offline. And, for your own sake, take ten minutes to appoint a contact and write down what you want.
Carriers do not archive the content of our messages; our devices do. What still remains of a conversation after a death therefore depends almost entirely on very concrete actions taken in the first few days by people who, on that particular day, are hardly in the mood for technicalities. Which is precisely why it is better to have thought about it beforehand.
Useful sources and references: CNIL (fact sheets on digital death and post-mortem directives), Act no. 2016-1321 for a Digital Republic of 7 October 2016, the French Data Protection Act (loi Informatique et Libertés, art. 40-1), Criminal Code (art. 226-15, privacy of correspondence), Postal and Electronic Communications Code (retention of connection data), the 33700 reporting service, Service-Public.fr (procedures following a death).
