What Happens to Your Accounts After Death?

It's 3 o'clock in the morning and you just shotgunned your last Red Bull to finish up debugging some code for the new software your company plans to launch next week. You decide to take a break and log into your Facebook account and find that John, who recently passed away, just shared a blog titled, "From Beyond the Grave" with you. Spooky right?

Whether you believe in ghost and the afterlife or not, that's enough to make anyone's neck hair stand up. Most likely, your friend hasn't come back from the grave to haunt you. He probably had a digital will made up and requested that the blog be posted and shared with you "From beyond the Grave". On a side note, your friend had a morbid sense of humor.

Now your saying, digital will? What's that? Just as you would make sure that your bank account is closed by the proper person in a physical will, you would want to make sure your digital or social media accounts are taken care of in the same way. While the details are still up in the air about the legality of a digital will, you still want to be prepared.

While most social media types haven't put a plan in place specific to this instance, Google has. Not surprised are you? It's just part of their plan for global domination. We jest, of course, but we all know that Google is chalk-full of brains that think of almost everything.

Google has created what's known as the Inactive Account Manager tool. Basically you can set the tool up to check to see if your alive in the event you stop using google for a set period of time. Kind of what you mom does if she doesn't hear from you within a week. One month before Google roles you down the tunnel to start the embalming process, they will poke you, a.k.a. message you, to see if you're just playing opossum or really no longer available. If you don't respond and the set time transpires, then Google will divvy up your passwords to the people you named privy of that information.

Said contacts will obtain your passwords to log into all of your accounts such as Picasa, YouTube, Gmail, Blogger, Drive and any other Google-based platform you may dabble in. From there, they'll be able to download and backup your data, close your accounts or whatever else you may want them to do, such as messing with your friends.

Unfortunately, as stated before, not everyone is on top of things like Google so you may want to include your other social media aspects in your digital will. Computerware can help you prepare for the inevitable with our extensive knowledge of the web. Is this service going too far? Let us know in the comments section.