Apple’s Photos App is deeply integrated into our daily use of our iPhones. At MacMAD, we get a lot of questions about photo storage, sync and general usage of the Photos App. So, this month we’re going to go over some of the common ones.
What happens to your digital possessions after your death? How can you make sure that they are available (or not available) to your heirs as you wish?
The same preparations that will help your heirs after your death can help you while you are alive. They can help with disaster recovery after a fire, flood, etc. They can help in the event you have to go to the hospital or are temporarily incapacitated. They can help if your phone or computer is lost, destroyed or just quits working.
For Apple users, the obvious place to start is your Apple ID. This single ID controls your Apple email account, your iCloud on-line storage and many other things you may or may not be using.
If your heirs know your Apple ID credentials, they can access your stored photos and documents, read your email, unlock your locked devices and prepare computers and devices for sale. Without your Apple ID, they may be completely locked out of doing any of those things.
Apple has a Legacy Contact Provision that you can use to designate a person to have access to your Apple ID after your death.
How to add a Legacy Contact for Your Apple ID
If someone has died without a Legacy Contact, you may still, in some circumstances, get access to their account.
How to request access to a deceased family member’s Apple account
Make a list of your on-line accounts and keep it in a safe place for your heirs. Note that probably every company you do business with has an on-line account. The list can be on paper, or in digital form. Just make sure that your heirs will be able to access the list.
You should make some notes as to the purpose and significance of each account. If you have an account at foobar.biz, will your heirs have any idea if that’s important, or why you had it? In a year or two, will you yourself remember why you created that account?
What’s in the List
Note that your Username on a site might be an email address or not. Note that the site probably doesn’t have anything to do with the email domain (me.com, in the example), unless the site is an email provider.
Passwords are case sensitive. For handwritten lists, make sure your writing is clear, and that upper and lower case letters are clearly distinguished. One convention is to underline capital letters. eMail addresses are never case sensitive, and are usually written in all lower case.
A password manager is essentially a place to keep a list of all your accounts, while keeping the passwords safely encrypted. This is ideal information for your heirs, if they can get access.
Legacy access is just another reason to use a password manager.
Popular Password Managers include:
You may be able to establish an emergency or legacy contact for your password manager. You may be able to have shared password vaults with your family members, so that they always have access to those accounts.
You should keep a paper copy of at least your most important accounts and passwords. This would likely include your password manager and passcodes to your devices. You should include backup 2FA (2nd factor Authentication) codes, if you use 2FA for those accounts. Don’t forget to mark on the 2FA codes exactly which service and account they are for. Put all these papers somewhere like a safe or safety deposit box.
You might think that your email is unimportant — just a pile of silly memes and spam. But your email is often the key to accessing your other, more important, accounts. Most accounts require an email address to sign up. If you forget your password (or your heirs don’t know it), the forgot password password recovery process uses your email to reset your password.
This is why you should use strong passwords and good security on your email accounts, and also why you should make sure your heirs can get access.
Death is another good reason not to use shared email and other accounts. You don’t want your account to be closed because your spouse has died.
Your phone is another way to access your accounts. The account sign-on or recovery process often includes a text message or phone call with a sign-in code. If you or your heirs lose access to your phone, that process will be stymied.
Apps on your phone are often the easiest way to access your accounts. If you have authenticator app(s) (for 2FA codes) on your phone that you use to sign in, how will your heirs sign in without access to your phone?
Google, LastPass, Microsoft and others have stand-alone authenticator apps.
The Apple Wallet App is probably only accessible on your iPhone or Apple Watch. Your heirs might need that to pay the credit card bills.
Precautions
If you need to restore a phone because of a forgotten passcode, almost everything will be restored, except Authenticator App data, and the Apple Wallet.
Every web site and company will have its own methods for account security and recovery. There are a few things you can do to make account recovery easier for you and for your heirs.
Establish backup email addresses, and backup telephone numbers if the site supports them. Add your trusted spouse’s phone, for example as a secondary method of receiving login codes.
Similar to your Apple ID, your Google account is multifaceted. It governs Gmail, Google Photos, Google Pay and Google Drive (and more). Many people have important documents and precious photos in Google Drive and Google Photos.
If you can’t or don’t want to provide credentials to your account to your estate, you can set up a policy with the Inactive Account Manager. You can specify what happens to your Google account when it becomes inactive for a specified time — presumably when you have died. You can give access to specified people, and/or specify that your account is to be deleted.
Many accounts have no legacy or inheritance feature. The survivors have to go through a process with a death certificate or letters of administration to gain control of the deceased account.
Financial Accounts
Home
Cars
2FA Keys
Other Companies & Web Sites in General
What would your heirs need in order to sell your computer?
iPad and iPhones, Apple Watch
Digital Media (usually can’t be officially transferred)
Social Media Accounts
Clubs and Organizations
Here are the slides from Dennis’ iCloud presentation of Nov 19, 2019, at the monthly MacMAD meeting.
Naturally, the link is to the Keynote slide show in iCloud.
Here’s some useful information from this month’s meeting on Contacts and Calendars.
The contacts and calendars apps exist on both the Mac (computers) and iOS (iPad & iPhone). The different versions can cooperate and share data via iCloud, but they are not the same. The Mac version can do some things, such as edit contact groups that the iOS version cannot do.
Here is Apple’s Support Article on Contacts for the Mac.� It is an overview of Contacts and how to use them.
And, similarly, here is Apple’s Support Article on Calendars on the Mac.
Besides Apple’s pre-defined Holiday calendar and your own calendars, you may find public calendars for various topics and groups on-line which you can subscribe to. For example, here is the MacMAD meeting calendar. �If you subscribe to that, you will see our monthly meetings. If any changes are made, you will see the changes automatically.
Our April, 2019 meeting was on email and iCloud.� Here are some helpful links from that meeting. Fittingly, the slides are shared through iCloud.
Here are the files from last night’s MacMAD meeting.
How better to share the information about iCloud than through iCloud? So, these links are to the presentation as iCloud documents.
Here are the slides in Keynote.
Here is the spreadsheet in Numbers.
When following these links, iCloud may ask you to enter a name for “collaborating”. You may enter any name you like, and click Join.
There has been a recent spate of phishing emails purporting to come from Apple. Typically they show some sort of a purchase or subscription that you supposedly bought from Apple. As always, DO NOT CLICK LINKS in emails.
If you want to check your account, do so from within iTunes, or by logging in at iCloud.com or Apple.com yourself.
In the email there are some suspicious indicators if you look for them. First of all, the email is not from the domain apple.com.
Second, the mail addresses you as “Valuable Customer”, not by name.
The bad guys expect you to be outraged that you are being charged for something you didn’t order — and that you will rashly click on the link they provided.
I don’t know what happens when you do that. Probably, it is a fake imitation of the Apple sign-in page where your credentials will be stolen. However, it may be some kind of attack that takes place merely by visiting the site.
Be safe out there, folks!
Your Apple ID is your single set of credentials for everything from Apple, including:
This is pretty important stuff, right? You don’t want your credentials to fall into the wrong hands!� Until recently, those credentials consisted of only your username and password, which seldom change. If a bad guy got hold of those, he’d have complete access to your Apple identity.
To help prevent that, Apple set up Two-Factor Authentication (2FA).� With 2FA, in addition to username and password, you must also give a verification code. Verification codes are sent to your phone or other trusted device. The verification code is different each time you log on.
Two-Factor Authentication is optional for users. However, you may now be forced to use it if you use certain apps — those which access your iCloud account.
Some apps require access to your files in iCloud, and therefore need your iCloud credentials to do so. This is fine, but you don’t want them to have the keys to your entire kingdom, do you? You don’t want a calendar app to order a new Macintosh, or delete your photos.
To control such apps, Apple now requires them to access iCloud using a One-Time password. This allows them to bypass 2FA, but using a special password which is only useable by that app for limited purposes. Once you give a one-time password to an app, and it uses it, it can never be used again for any other purpose.
You do not need to store or remember one-time passwords. If for some reason you need to re-authorize an app, you can simply generate a new one-time password for it.� Dennis explains how to do all this in these slides from this month’s meeting:
I set out recently to find a shared iOS shopping list App to replace my family’s paper grocery shopping list. I had some pretty simple requirements:
I spent some time in the App store looking at reviews and didn’t see anything I wanted to buy. Some otherwise useful apps had a bad reputation for crashing. Others were just too complex. Some needed a subscription and a sign-on for sharing to work. It’s just creepy that the vendor would be watching everything on your shopping list.
Eventually I found it. An app that was already on my phone that met all my requirements and didn’t need any additional sign-ups, plus you can use Siri to add items to the list by voice.
The app is:� Reminders — the humble Apple Reminders app that comes with iOS.
Here’s an overview from iMore on how to set Reminders up for sharing.
A couple of tips:
Enjoy!
Recently, I have been receiving mysterious spam calendar invitations like the one below. You may have received them also.
I never saw a corresponding email. Even worse, the only options are accept or decline. Either one sends a message back to the spammer, confirming my email address! This junk is coming through your iCloud account. Here are instructions for preventing this type of spam from The Dangling Pointer blog. �
Since this is associated with your iCloud calendar, it affects both iOS and Macintosh.
They probably didn’t get your email address from anywhere. It appears they are trying big lists of likely email addresses @icloud.com.