1Password Access after Death, Legacy Contacts

@ooglek

We do not have any available options like what you're seeking. Well, short of sharing the Emergency Kit and password. I hope that will change.

For now, I've shared my Emergency Kit with my adult children, and I keep my password secured in a safe (inside a sealed envelope), which will be opened when I pass. It's a grim subject, but you are 100% correct. It is one that needs to be addressed beforehand. I recommend ensuring anyone in a family membership has a secondary organizer.

🚑 Recover accounts for family or team members

I went through this several years ago with my wife. We prepared using the above method. We thought I would be the first to go. That didn't happen. Life throws you those curveballs.

I can let the team know this subject is also on your mind.

ref: PB-37977565

As I age and see the disarray some family members have left for others, I want more and more not to leave a mess for my survivors. This is really, really important. If 1PW is not yet ready to implement a specific purpose-built program for this, I would really appreciate a comprehensive discussion on the website (not abbreviated in the Community) as to all the potential work-arounds we could use. It should be written for laypeople, and not laden with shoptalk.

Adding to this mountain of requests for legacy access.

I use Simple Login instead of Fastmail for unique email addresses for every service so, on top of family not being aware of unique long passwords for every service, having MFA or a passkey for access- they won't even know what email address is being used for any given service. 1Password access after that bus finally catches me is going to be critical.

That said, I'm hoping the legacy feature, if and when we get it, allows designation of a specific vault (or a tag/category) to provide access to. I'd like to be able to organize or some how specify which credentials should be shared if I'm snuffed out.

I've got nearly 500 items in 1Password currently and I can only see that growing as time goes on and I use the tool for more and more items which I expect would be stressful, confusing, and exhausting to sift through when successors would need maybe a dozen or two credentials. I'd also prefer to keep things such as shared, work related, social media and other dumb things private and basically make it as simple as possible for less tech-savvy and unfamiliar people to get access to the few important things they'll need.

Hello! Just echoing this. I have been using LastPass because of their Emergency feature, and looking to potentially change to 1Password but this will be a blocker for me.

Recently a close friend lost her husband unexpectedly and suddenly. She has had so many issues canceling subscriptions and having access to all the things he had access to. We don't want to think about these things, but I think inherently a Family account should be covering that for us. Knowing that my passwords are safe on a vault that my family can access if anything was to happen to me is really important. And the other way around!

All the current solutions I see require a million things to setup and so many chances for frustration (no access to email, not sure which 2FA is enabled, etc.). Also, printing the page doesn't seem like a great idea considering 1Password principles: that basically gives access to anyone that finds the page very easily at any point.

It's hard enough to deal with the grieve of losing a loved one, it would be great if products like 1Password prioritised making such a human and difficult moment an easier one.

I'll remain hopeful to see a feature like this come into 1Password :)

Hi, I'm also interested a lot in this legacy/emergency access. Bitwarden and Ente have it. For now I'm forced to have this convoluted setup:
- print the Emergency Kit, give it to family members
- I use an open-source third party emergency access service (https://weexpire.org/) to E2EE encrypt a note with my 1Password master passphrase. With a 7 days wait time
- it gives me a link (containing the encrypted note) and an access code that I put in an item "in case of emergency" in a shared vault with my family member/emergency contact

When needed they open the link, provide the access code on the website, wait 7 days, re-open the link, get my master passphrase, use this with my emergency kit they already have to connect to my account.

Clearly not ideal for ease of use

Add me to the long list of people (judging by the number of search results in Google for this sort of thing) who are strongly in favor of some kind of time-delayed emergency/contingency access feature similar to what LastPass has. In previous discussions I have seen "security" cited as the reason 1P has not implemented such a feature, and granted there is always a tradeoff between security and convenience, but the "user story" I would like the product management team to consider is:

• I have close family/friends I would trust to manage my affairs in case I am incapacitated or dead
• In many cases I may already today be using Family product features to share secrets/creds with them
• But only to a limited subset of accounts, because I do not necessarily trust them to have the same amount of tech savvy or paranoia etc. as I do, and I don't necessarily want to give them full access to all my financial data etc.
• And when I say "them" I mean "them, or anyone who compromises their devices/accounts, or can be in a position to extort/coerce it out of them" -- this is why the time delay feature is crucial. If I am actually alive and functioning :) it gives me time to veto an unauthorized access. If I am dead or in a coma, then giving my loved ones access to my info becomes a priority and outweighs any concerns I might have about their security hygiene.
• For the above/similar reasons, sharing the Emergency Kit and actual passphrase is a non-starter
• The "recover accounts for family members" feature doesn't work either, because you can't (I believe) recover your own account, and in a scenario where I'm dead, it doesn't help if a trusted person can "recover" my account because they would need access to my email to complete the recovery.

There are always tradeoffs involved; the goal is to make the consciously and knowingly. If 1P feels this sort of feature renders the product inherently less secure, it can still implement it and make it optional, with lots of warning dialogs and disclaimers that people have to click through to enable it, but they can still make that choice for themselves.

If I'm missing something and/or there's an existing way to address the above concerns, I'm all ears!

Alternatively, I would be much happier sharing my emergency kit with people if there was a "when your Emergency Kit is used from a new location, send a notification and require either 2FA or ___ days to elapse before it can be used" option available, which accomplishes the same thing.

Zorak

I didn't want you to think we missed you. I've been behind the scenes the last couple of days. I have passed your thoughts on to the rest of the team. Thank you for taking the time to share them.

1P_Tommy I fully agree with Zorak, please pass my request along to the team as well.

This feature so important, that I am almost willing to switch to some other product. I switched to 1password from LastPass because of the problems they had, but they kind of feel minor compared to the value of the "Emergency Access" feature.

glowndes

When you set up 2FA authenticator app there is a "can't scan code" a string of characters beside the QR code for the 2FA app. You can print that and include it on the kit. I typically write mine on the back of the Emergency Kit with the date and what the code is for.

1P_Tommy

Do you understand that what you are suggesting completely makes the whole point of storing passwords in 1Password a complete waste. What happens if someone manages to find that piece of paper who shouldn’t have access to it?

I might as well just have a notebook with all my passwords in it.