Your Google Accounts Can Self-Destruct When Expired
Matt St-Georges / 11 years ago
Google announced a brand new feature dubbed Inactive Account Manager. What this allows you to do is set what occurs when your Google account goes unused for three, six, nine or 12 months.
The thing you might have realized by now is Google is kind of everywhere. So whether you have a PC, laptop, notebook, tablet, phone, MP3 player or anything else with wifi, odds are you might have a Google account. There could be alot of stuff stored on various Google servers, so let’s say your Inactive Account Manager kicks in after 6 months of inactivity. You can choose to have it totally deleted. This covers everything from +1s, Blogger, Contacts, Circles, Drive, Gmail, Google+, Pages, Streams, Picasa, Google Voice and YouTube. The other option is to have your information transferred to pre-determined contacts. Don’t worry though, if you’re still alive, it contacts your cell-phone and secondary email before doing all this.
Techcruch asked a very good question towards Google: what happens when you have told the system to delete all of your data and there is a family member or other interested party who wants access to your account?
A Google spokesperson told us that “when there’s a conflict, we will honor the preference you’ve made in Inactive Account Manager to the extent permitted by law.
Keep in mind too, this is not giving up passwords and the what not. It’s only your data, so you can have 10 contacts, and configure what accounts’ data they have access to such as Blogger, Gmail, YouTube & more. They’ll have access to your data through their own accounts.
