What happens to your Google Account when you die?
Mina Sirkin, a Probate Attorney in Los Angeles says that Google will consider your account an inactive account, but has implemented a way for you to set up a Trusted Contact person who will be able to download parts of your account data if your account is inactive for a period of time.
Here's Google's policy on inactive accounts and what you can do to protect yourself:
"Inactive Account Manager is a way for users to share parts of their account data or notify someone if they’ve been inactive for a certain period of time. To set up Inactive Account Manager, go to www.google.com/settings and click on the setup link under Account Management.
How do we detect activity?
We look at several signals to understand whether you are still using your Google Account. These include your last sign-ins, your web history, usage of Gmail (e.g., the Gmail app on your phone) and Android check-ins.
What happens when your account gets deleted?
Deleting your Google Account will affect all products associated with that account (e.g., Blogger, AdSense, Gmail), and affect each product differently. You can review the data associated with your account on the Google Dashboard. If you use Gmail with your account, you'll no longer be able to access that email. You'll also be unable to reuse your Gmail username.
Why do I need to provide a phone number for a trusted contact?
We'll use the phone number for the sole purpose of ensuring that only the trusted contact can actually download your data. Verifying the identity using a mobile phone number prevents data access from unauthorized people who might get hold of the email we send to your trusted contact.
What will trusted contacts receive?
Contacts will only receive notification once your account has been inactive for the specified amount of time -- they will not receive any notification during setup. If you chose to only notify your contacts of your inactive account, they'll receive an email with a subject line and content that you wrote during setup. We'll add a footer to that email, explaining that you've instructed Google to send an email on your behalf after you've stopped using your account. This footer might say something like this:
John Doe ([email protected]) instructed Google to send you this mail automatically after John stopped using his account.
Sincerely,
The Google Accounts Team
If you chose to share data with your trusted contact, the email will additionally contain a list of the data you have chosen to share with them, and a link they can follow to download the data. An example of such message could be:
John Doe ([email protected]) instructed Google to send you this mail automatically after John stopped using his account.
John Doe has given you access to the following account data:
- +1s
- Blogger
- Drive
- Latitude
- Picasa Web Albums
- YouTube
Download John's data here.
Sincerely,
The Google Accounts Team
Learn more about how you can share your data with trusted contacts."
Above was quoted from Google's support page.
Mina N. Sirkin is a Probate Attorney in Los Angeles. She is a Certified Specialist Attorney in Trusts, Estate Planning and Probate. Tel.: 818-340-4479.