Proton AG has been quite busy lately. It launched Proton Authenticator, a free open-source two-factor authentication app, and the privacy-friendly AI Lumo in the past month.
Today, the company announced a new feature for paid members. Emergency Access is designed to provide a way into a user’s account under certain circumstances, such as injury or death.
Proton writes in a new blog post:
With our new Emergency Access feature, you can grant permission to trusted contacts to securely access your Proton Account after a set period of time, ensuring nothing important is lost if you’re unable to enter your account due to death or illness.
Proton users may select up to five trusted contacts who may access a user’s account either immediately or after a select wait time that they may set in advance. For this to work, the trusted contacts do need a Proton Account of their own.
When a trusted contact requests access, one of two things happens: if the user set up a wait time, they may approve or deny the request in that period. Once the wait time is over, the request is granted automatically and the trusted contact gains access to the entire account.
For instance, if you set the wait time to four weeks, you have four weeks to allow or deny the request.
Emergency access can be disabled at any time by the account owner. Furthermore, Proton notes that it is applying to the entire Proton account of the user and not just a single application.
Proton users may set up the feature under Recovery > Add emergency contact. There they may add email addresses of their trusted contacts. Proton notes that the emails need to be associated with a Proton account.
Trusted contacts may request emergency access under Settings > Recovery.
Now You: do you have set up emergency options for accounts that support it? Feel free to leave a comment down below.