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Forum Discussion
1Password Access after Death, Legacy Contacts
I am not planning to die anytime soon, but sometimes things happen.
Beyond securing my 1Password details in an Escrow account, or with a lawyer, or in a bank lockbox, does 1Password offer any mean...
I am going to preface my post by saying that I have been a big proponent of getting Legacy Access feature in 1Password. I even left 1Password for Bitwarden due to the fact that Bitwarden has this feature. I have since done a whole big circle and I am back with 1Password.
Other password managers such as Bitwarden, Proton Pass, and NordPass (AFAIK) have an emergency access feature. I have found that both Bitwarden and Proton Pass (I'm not sure about NordPass) require the emergency contact(s) to also have an account to be able to accept the invitation to become your emergency contact and access your account if anything happens to you. In both cases, they can have a free account with that provider. It blew my mind when my daughter told me that she had to create a Bitwarden account to accept my invitation to become an emergency contact.
It makes no sense to me that an emergency contact needs to create an account for a service that they may never use, other than if something were to happen to me 20 years from now.
There is a way around this. Both Proton and Bitwarden say that you can record your login, master password, and any other pertinent information on a sheet of paper and keep it somewhere safe, such as in a safe. Does that sound familiar? This sounds like the same solution that 1Password has.
The whole point -is- the emergency contact should have the account with the service, this way -your- login/pw/key don't have to be written down. Your vault transfers to their account with proper Emergency access. No paper w/ password, more secure and clean that way.
And there's the rub. If this is the way that it needs to work, an emergency contact would need to have a 1password account. Since 1Password does not offer a free version, they would need to pay for a service that they may not use.
The idea would be that this is available to people within your family plan group, which makes the cryptography of it work, so you would just add them to your family plan so there is no out of pocket cost to them. Presumably you are likely to make another family member the emergency contact.
Either way, if you trust the person to access to your 1P account, I would assume they are using a PW manager anyway :)
