Being survived by my spouse is one of my greatest fears. I have an "in case of death" file and my spouse knows where to get it. I don't find your list helpful in my case though. Mine is a lot simpler:
1. A list of all our financial accounts (checking, savings, retirement, etc) and bills. My spouse already has access to all these, but I handle all the day-to-day finances so it would be easy to forget a particular account or bill exists.
2. Phone numbers, URLs, and policy numbers for my life insurance policies.
3. Information about our internet and our off-site backups. Along with complicated networking equipment, I am self-hosting some software like DNS that could cause the home wifi to stop working if it's not maintained properly. I have instructions on how to unplug it all and set up an off-the-shelf router.
4. Instructions on how to get "In Case of Emergency" access to my password manager. I don't think this is necessary but might make a few things easier.
5. Personal advice on getting help and not withdrawing from family during the grieving process
Outside of this, I also have Google Inactivity Manager set up to automatically notify close friends if both me and my spouse pass away. While I'm guessing the police would notify our family somehow, my parents don't have contact information on my closest friends.
Interesting, did not know about this. I think there’s no good solution yet on how to be notified if an acquaintance (not close friend or family member) dies. It used to be death notices in the local newspaper, but that’s out because my acquaintances live in so many different places. Does anyone have experience with Google Inactivity Manager?
I might be one of the few with full experience (assuming the rest who have used it start-to-finish are dead).
I accidentally let mine trigger a couple years ago. It was on a Gmail address that my family knows is me, but I don't sign in very often, and I must have let it lapse.
Six family members each received slightly personalized "if you're reading this..." emails that I'd composed, and a couple of them were granted access to the account. I realized quickly what had happened, because I set my main email address as one of the recipients, and I reset it within about an hour.
Fortunately, I don't have any skeletons in my closet that I plan to disclose on my deathbed, so these emails were a lot closer to boring checklists than poems or confessions.
Everyone got the mail, but nobody panicked (or actually even acknowledged it), and as far as I know nobody used the account access.
This was an unsettling "what if I threw a funeral and nobody came?" moment. But it also showed me that many people just don't read their email that frequently.
I still think the feature is wonderful, and a great way to conveniently handle one element of digital-estate disposition. But the message does risk getting lost in the stream of crap that is most of today's inboxes, so I'd also recommend a Plan B.
Google Inactivity Manager is supposed to be used to grant access to your account after you die. In my case my account is not important, I only use it for Youtube these days, but you can write a custom message so that's primarily my use case for it.
After you set it up, you get an email every few months reminding you that you have it set up. I have it set up to fire a few months after my account has no activity (YouTube logins etc).
However your question made me think. My email provider is forwarding emails delivered to my Gmail via IMAP and I'm not sure if this is considered "account activity." If it is, Google Inactivity Manager may take a very long time to kick in since this forwarding is likely to continue long after I die. I can't find any documentation about this online.
I've heard a few people talk about Dead Man's Switch[1] for this purpose but I've never used it. Theoretically it might be possible to self host a solution with a cloud provider. Using a free service like Lambda your account should survive you even if your credit card is closed.
Huh. Is Google Inactivity Manager something one could use to safeguard against the failure modes of their push to 2-factor auth? As in, set it on shortest possible check-up period, so in case you break your phone and forgot where you put the backup single-use 2FA keys, all you need to do is log out from Google account on any other device, and wait a month or three, and you'll eventually get your account back?
In theory, yes. That's exactly how it would work - after whatever time you've set a nominated person gets an email allowing them to change your password and all authentication methods so yes, you could potentially get it back this way. Haven't even thought about it tbh and I have it set up.
A bit risky if you don't use it frequently, you could cause others in your family distress should you for some reason not log on for the period of time set. Perhaps a good idea to inform those people that you are doing this at the very least.
Also, keep a copy of everything with a trusted lawyer who can execute your will (if you are on this forum, you can mostly likely afford one). Hardware and software can fail, don’t put all your faith in automated systems.
Okay I admit my reply wasn't that good. I'll take another shot:
I think it's ignorant to assume that everyone on hacker news lives in a developed country and makes a lot of money. The statement was completely unnecessary, and could've been much more useful if it instead said "if you can afford one".
I don't know, I'm still in my 20s, maybe my mind will change as I get older. Today if I had to choose between my spouse grieving or the other way around I'd rather it be me.
1. A list of all our financial accounts (checking, savings, retirement, etc) and bills. My spouse already has access to all these, but I handle all the day-to-day finances so it would be easy to forget a particular account or bill exists.
2. Phone numbers, URLs, and policy numbers for my life insurance policies.
3. Information about our internet and our off-site backups. Along with complicated networking equipment, I am self-hosting some software like DNS that could cause the home wifi to stop working if it's not maintained properly. I have instructions on how to unplug it all and set up an off-the-shelf router.
4. Instructions on how to get "In Case of Emergency" access to my password manager. I don't think this is necessary but might make a few things easier.
5. Personal advice on getting help and not withdrawing from family during the grieving process
Outside of this, I also have Google Inactivity Manager set up to automatically notify close friends if both me and my spouse pass away. While I'm guessing the police would notify our family somehow, my parents don't have contact information on my closest friends.