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Comment by debaserab2 | Hacker News Reader

My gmail account has a deadman’s switch to grant full access to my next of kin.

If I had a gigabytes of photos of my grandparents or great grandparents I would spend hours pouring over them looking at what their life was like before I knew them. That would be such a neat keepsake.

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I hate to tell you this but many people have been locked out of their Google Accounts despite knowing the correct username/password combination. Their security policies and ML algo locks accounts and requires 2FA to be used from time to time. How confident are you that in your passing, your next of kin will be able to get into that account if 2FA or backup codes are inaccessible?

Given their is no real customer service team that handles their free tier accounts, I am personally reluctant to assume my Gdrive data will be salvageable.

According to the Google Inactive Account support page, they aren't actually assuming the account, they're just getting access to the data. So, presumably, they'd just download the data and that would be it.

https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3036546?hl=en

(That's not to say there aren't other concerning reasons why that data may not be accessible.)

That is lovely to know about. I was only aware of the dead mans switch feature which deletes data after a period of time.

I imagine someone may one day do the same for me, but sadly most of my photos are clogged with mundane screenshots and repeint pictures and other junk.

>gmail account has a deadman’s switch

How do you do this?

https://myaccount.google.com/inactive

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