There have been other services out there like www.deathswitch.com and passmywill.com that answer the question, what happens to my digital accounts when my physical life ends? Now Google posted that they are handling the morbid matter natively.
The Inactive Account Manager will keep track of your last login and if you don’t log into your account within the timeout period which you configure, it will send you an alert via email or text message.
If you don’t reply before the Timeout period ends, Google will notify the contacts that you designated and optionally with data you specified. You can also have Google delete your data on your behalf.
From the Google Public Policy Blog:
For example, 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.
It’s a little bit of comfort in a morbid topic. But it’s also a hard thought to figure out what timeout period you would choose. The longer you choose, the longer your contacts will have to wait for data which may help them adjust to your not being around. Or perhaps nothing will befall you but instead you just stopped using Google’s services, you might as well clean up your data after you haven’t touched it in a while.
You can find and configure the settings in the Inactive Account Manager for your Google account.