What happens to your google life, after death ?

Death is an un-easy fact for all of us. But making plans for what happens after you’re gone is really important for the people you leave behind.

If you have worries about who will read your personal mails or conversations after your death, here comes a final solution as Google’s new service gives you the option of a ‘Digital Will’.

The search giant have come up with a cool and intresting new feature called Inactive Account Manager, which gives users the power to decide what to do with their documents, digital photos and other virtual belongings in the event of their death.

As Andreas Tuerk of Google explained:

    You can choose to have your data deleted — after three, six, nine or 12 months of inactivity. Or you can select trusted contacts to receive data from some or all of the following services: +1s; Blogger; Contacts and Circles; Drive; Gmail; Google+ Profiles, Pages and Streams; Picasa Web Albums; Google Voice and YouTube. Before our systems take any action, we’ll first warn you by sending a text message to your cellphone and email to the secondary address you’ve provided.

    We hope that this new feature will enable you to plan your digital afterlife — in a way that protects your privacy and security — and make life easier for your loved ones after you’re gone.

You can find the Inactive Account Manager on the Google Account settings page. This feature allows you to choose what you want Google to do with all your accounts and the data in them, if you haven’t logged in for a specified period of time. You could either transfer them to your loved ones by providing their email as the trusted email or ask Google to delete all.

Google has also clarified that the person you’ve authorized will not get any passwords or able to use your Gmail account, as they will only be getting the data.

Now Let’s see how to set up Inactive Account Manager

The service can be activated by clicking on a link on the Accounts page under the Account Management section.

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

In the “Alert me” section, you must give a mobile number to which Google will send a reminder text message one month before your account becomes inactive. You can also provide an alternate e-mail address (that is, one other than the Gmail address associated with your account).

The next field, “Timeout period,” lets you set the period of inactivity that must occur before, basically, Google thinks you’re dead. You can set this for 3, 6, 9, or 12 months.

In the next section, “Notify contacts and share data,” you can name up to 10 contacts, who will be notified when your account has remained inactive for the specified period of time. You can also check the box for “Share my data with this contact” and choose which Google products you’d like to share data from.

Contacts you choose to share with will be able (after your timeout period is up) to download your data for three months. For each contact, you will need to also provide a phone number that Google can use to send a verification code the contact will need to access your data. Also in this section, you can set an auto-response for all incoming e-mails to your Gmail address once it becomes inactive.

If you would prefer to erase your online data instead of sharing it with anyone, then the service also provides you a fourth section, “Optionally delete account.” Here you can click on the toggle switch to  “Delete my account.” At last, click the blue ‘Enable’ button to complete the setup process.

Now, if you’re interested in Google’s new service, you can check out the Inactive Account Manager and set one up.