Ever imagined what will happen to your digital data, especially emails and photos after you die? Google is here to help you in deciding what to do with your digital data when you die or no longer using your account. The new feature called the Google ‘Inactive Account Manager’ allows you to decide what to do with all the data from several Google services if your account becomes inactive for any reason.
With this enabled you can delete your data entirely after the pre-set time period of three, six, nine or 12 months of inactivity. Or you have an option to select trusted contacts to receive data from your Google accounts, they are notified about this after a pre-set time period. Your trusted contacts can retrieve data from following Google services +1s; Blogger; Contacts and Circles; Drive; Gmail; Google+ Profiles, Pages and Streams; Picasa Web Albums; Google Voice and YouTube.
How to activate the service?
- Visit your Google Account settings page here. (you need to login with your Google account) and click on the setup.
- You can now choose the time period, “when your account will time out if you haven’t signed-in to your Google account.“
- Notify contacts and share data– You can add up to 10 trusted contacts under your account who will get notified about this account inactive status and will receive your Google account data.
- Optionally you can choose to delete your Google account along with all your data after the speculated time period
Source – Inactive Account Manager