Learn how to use this new Google service that acts as a kind of digital will for the information you’ve got stored with Google in the event of your death.

What happens to your Gmail account, Google Drive documents, Picasa photos, and also the different data you have got stored with Google once you head to that huge cloud drive within the sky? Google introduced a feature nowadays known as Inactive Account Manager that enables you to tell Google what to do together with your data when you are gone, whether you would like to share it with family and friends or delete it altogether.

The new Inactive Account Manager will be accessed from the Accounts page. you will find a link to that beneath the Account Management section.

After reading the transient introduction to the service, click the blue Setup button. On the setup page, you will find four sections:

In the “Alert me” field, you need to offer a mobile phone number to which Google can send a warning text message one month before your account is deemed inactive. you can additionally offer an alternate e-mail address (that is, one apart from the Gmail address related to your account).

The next field, “Timeout period,” enables you to set the period of inactivity that has got to occur before, basically, Google thinks you are dead. you can set this for three, 6, 9, or twelve months.

In the next section, “Notify contacts and share data,” you can name up to ten contacts, that i would imagine would be close friends and members of the family, who are going to be notified when your account has remained inactive for the desired period of your time. for every contact, you can set it up so that contact is solely notified that your account is inactive, otherwise you can check the box for “Share my data with this contact” and opt for which Google product you need to share data from.

Contacts you select to share with will be ready (after your timeout period is up) to transfer your data for 3 months. for each contact, {you can|you’ll|you may} need to additionally offer a number that Google will use to send a verification code the contact will need to access your data. additionally during this section, you can set an auto-response for all incoming e-mails to your Gmail address once it becomes inactive.

If rather than sharing your Google data from on the far side the grave, you’d rather simply delete everything, take a glance at the fourth and last section, “Optionally delete account.” Here you can click the switch to On next to “Delete my account.”