16 comments

[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 45.7 ms ] thread
Ouch. I guess this has been around long enough, we must also assume the sad duties of sorting through digital belongings, too.
Yes, dealing with these situations is hard.

But relatively speaking, I'd rather be able to easily access photos and so on (if granted permission) than not.

And hopefully there will be many good memories to look at.

(comment deleted)
This is probably useful for expected outcomes, but maybe not the more tragic, sudden deaths. Giving parents a chance to deal with tragic circumstances, please offer alternative ways, such as death certificate and family identification, could be done with a notarized service.
I really hope not, because of the amount of abuse that happens in family and domestic situations. This absolutely needs to be approved by the account holder. No amount of death certificates should let you in.
Absolutely! Being related isn't enough to be sure that nothing malicious is happening. Also, without the account holder opting in, there could be things left behind they'd rather not share.
Definitely a much needed service.

OTOH, I hope it is secure because it will absolutely be an attack vector.

To save your family from having to deal with this please use a password manager.

Its super easy to write down the master password somewhere where they can easily find it.

Yeah but then they'd find out what I'm...in to
That isn't going to work for Apple accounts because they need 2FA verification from another Apple device, which is usually behind some biometric lock.
Not if you put your apple device passcodes into your password manager as well -- all those biometrics are just shortcuts to avoid having to enter your passcode constantly.
All the support links on that page seem to be broken.

I wonder if there's some form of verification if someone is trying to use this feature to take over an account, because otherwise it is prone to abuse.

Is there something similar for Google? I would love to download my mother's email. She died while I was in jail and while I know her username and password it's no longer enough to get into a Gmail account since they're a lot more secure these days.