You Now Have Control Over Your Digital Afterlife

Black Tie Digital Marketing wants to know if you have you ever wondered about what will happen to your online presence after you have passed on. I know I have. Ever since I got a Facebook account, I have always kept a list of my passwords so someone in my family could deactivate my accounts so my online presence would no longer exist. Not everyone feels this way though and the invention of LivesOn (an app that will essentially learn your habits and tweet for you after you have died) proves that not everyone wants their Internet presence to disappear after death.

However, Google is launching its Inactive Account Manager on the Google Account settings page, which sets out to set up a system that allows you to tell Google “what you want done with your digital assets when you die or can no longer use your account.” With the Inactive Account Manager, you can set up a very straightforward procedure for what should happen to your data after your account becomes inactive “for any reason.”

The first step is to select a timeout period (three, six, nine, or twelve months of inactivity). After that time period, you can choose to have all of your data deleted or one of your trusted contacts can receive your data services.

The Inactive Account Manager explains that you can choose to send your data from Blogger, Contacts and Circles, Drive, Gmail, Google+ Profiles, Pages and Streams, Picasa Web Albums, Google Voice and YouTube, as well as your +1s from across the web to whoever you choose to receive it after your timeout period. This doesn’t mean people will be able to send email from your accounts – they are not getting your passwords. Just your data. Of course, Google will first try to contact you by email (to your secondary address) and text message to ensure that you are really dead and didn’t just switch to Bing and Outlook.com.

While this is Google’s version of dealing with your data after you have passed on, Facebook and Twitter have come up with a different approach. Facebook won’t provide others with your login information, but it has a procedure in place for “memorializing” your account. Twitter has a slightly more complicated system, unless you have opted into using LivesOn in which your account will remain active and there will be someone in charge of handling all of your information.

If you need help with Digital Marketing in Melbourne, Florida then give our team at Black Tie Digital Marketing a call today to see how we can help you.