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.
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.
1: https://www.deadmansswitch.net/