New Delhi: Until now, inheritance battles in Indian courtrooms have been fought over property, money, gold and jewellery. But, a Gandhinagar court’s decision earlier this month allowing a woman to access her late father’s iCloud account may just have opened a legal gateway for next of kin to also inherit something less tangible—digital property.
Relying on settled legal principles while navigating the contours of the Indian Succession Act and the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, the ruling raises a more complicated question: should legal heirs automatically gain access to deeply personal digital information simply because it forms part of a deceased person’s estate?
The case arose when Shaishav Dineshbhai Shah from Gandhinagar died intestate (without leaving a will) on 24 April, 2025, with his wife and daughter as his only Class-I legal heirs. While the family inherited his physical belongings, they hit a wall regarding his “digital estate”: an iPhone 13 Pro Max and an associated Apple iCloud account.
Arguing that the account contained data of immense “emotional, sentimental, and practical significance”, including years of photographs, videos, and voice notes, the daughter sought “Letters of Administration” for assets that exist not in a bank vault, but on a server.
Apple said it could only facilitate access if the family was formally appointed as the estate’s legal administrator through a specific court order.
Granting the plea, the court of Himanshu Choudhary, Additional Senior Civil Judge in Gandhinagar, said that in the absence of a nominee, the rights to manage and access the data must logically devolve upon the legal heirs, who essentially step into the position of a “data principal” for administration.
The core of the legal strategy rested on the Indian Succession Act, 1925.
The petitioners filed their case under Section 278 of the act, seeking to be appointed as administrators of the deceased’s estate. A critical challenge was determining whether digital data could be considered “property” under the century-old law.
The court concluded that the existing legal framework in India was sufficiently broad to recognise digital data as “movable property”.
Drawing from the General Clauses Act, 1897, and the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, the court noted that the definition of property is inclusive and expansive.
By recognising digital assets as part of the “estate”, the court allowed the Indian Succession Act to be applied to cloud storage, granting the daughter the authority to manage her father’s digital legacy as his legal representative.
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Posthumous governance of digital assets
The other major hurdle is the right to privacy. The court highlighted that the right to privacy is an “inherently personal right” that “extinguishes with the individual”.
Applying the legal maxim actio personalis moritur cum persona (a personal right of action dies with the person), the judge held that privacy claims cannot be used to block lawful heirs from administering a digital estate.
Section 14 of the DPDP Act allows a “data principal” to nominate a person to exercise their rights after death.
In this case, the father had not appointed a nominee. But, the court determined that the digital data stored in the deceased’s iCloud account constituted a valuable digital asset that is part of the deceased’s estate, capable of administration under the act.
Directing Apple to assist the daughter in recovering the data from both the physical device and the iCloud account—including facilitating password resets and providing technical assistance to retrieve locally stored data where feasible—the court ruled on what it called the “posthumous governance of digital assets”.
It said such governance is largely determined by the unilateral contractual terms of service providers, which has been characterised as “digital feudalism” where control is concentrated in private platforms rather than users or their legal heirs.
The judge was referring to Drake University law professor Natalie M. Banta’s paper characterising such governance as digital feudalism.
‘Digital assets’ and ‘personal info’
Legal experts ThePrint spoke to said the judgment treads on new territory in Indian jurisprudence. Delhi advocate Urvi Mohan said this is a new and evolving area of jurisprudence in India, with limited legal precedent so far.
She added that the ruling opened up a more layered conversation around digital inheritance because “digital assets” and “personal information” may not always be the same thing: while certain digital assets may comfortably fall within the framework of succession law, deeply personal data may raise entirely different concerns around privacy and consent after death. She recalled how Raghu Rai, one of India’s most celebrated photographers who recently passed away also formally bequeathed his original digital and physical archives to the Raghu Rai Foundation as part of his will.
Akash Karmakar, a partner at Panag and Babu, said the Gandhinagar court order could open the floodgates for people approaching courts to seek orders for the decryption of crypto wallets held by their deceased parents, as well as access to social media, email IDs and other digital estates.
However, he cautioned that the order had limited precedential value unless it is ratified by a higher court.
Both Mohan and Karmakar said the order adds a judicial oversight and interpretation to settled law principles.
“This doesn’t make it easier to access digital estates since access would likely be granted only upon judicial scrutiny; that rules out any route other than to knock on the doors of a court. A painful but nuanced assessment of successorship is key to discretionary access,” said Karmakar.
Effectively recognising iCloud data as property, Karmakar said the ruling is a caveated order which recognises that digital data carries the operative attributes of property but also sits at the intersection of data protection and succession laws in India.
Mohan noted that under traditional succession laws, Class-I and Class-II legal heirs inherit a deceased person’s estate by operation of law.
But, a person may not necessarily want those heirs to access intimate personal data, private communications, photographs, or other sensitive digital information after death, thereby creating potential tension between inheritance rights and individual privacy preferences. For this, she drew a parallel with bank lockers and nominations: even if a person nominates someone for a bank account or locker, the nominee often functions only as a custodian, while the legal heirs remain the ultimate beneficiaries under succession law.
Digital data may operate differently: an individual might consciously want a trusted friend or another nominee—rather than family members or legal heirs—to control or access certain personal information after death. At the same time, Mohan drew a distinction between “digital property” and “personal digital information”, which is likely to become increasingly important as courts and lawmakers grapple with posthumous data rights.
She said that the judgment highlights the need for people to think proactively about how they want their digital lives to be handled after death, including whether specific wishes should be clearly recorded in wills or estate-planning documents.
Digital asset will
Karmakar also explained how a phone and data stored on the phone locally are physical assets. The data on the cloud, which is linked to an Apple ID, is non-transferable but this is a flaw in Apple’s terms as it doesn’t contemplate survivorship-based access.
Inheritability, he said, in this instance, is more of a right of access rather than a right to step into the shoes of the deceased and use the account using their credentials.
Section 14 of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, he explained, lets a data principal nominate someone to exercise their rights after death or incapacity.
However, in a country where wills are rarely drafted and even fewer times read out to successors, this nomination cannot conflict with the will.
The court also noted pending legislation mentioned by the petitioners.
A bill pending in Parliament proposes amendments to the Information Technology Act, 2000, to formally define digital assets and provide for their posthumous management, reflecting a legislative intent to address this emerging issue.
The proposed amendments also introduce concepts such as “digital asset will”, “digital executor”, and management of the digital assets of a deceased person, indicating legislative recognition of the gap in the existing framework.
(Edited by Sugita Katyal)
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