🛑 Google deleted you on purpose

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📬 Did someone forward this to you? Smart person. Sign up here. Tomorrow: Every color laser printer secretly encodes your identity on every page you print. The Secret Service designed the program in the 1980s, and it never stopped. 

🇺🇸 Say hello to the start of a long holiday weekend, {{first_name | friend}}. Before Velcro was on sneakers, lunch boxes and every toddler’s jacket, it started with one very clingy nature moment. In 1941, Swiss engineer George de Mestral came home from an Alpine hike covered in burrs. 

Most people would simply pick them off. He pulled one out, stuck it under a microscope and saw thousands of tiny hooks. He spent the next 14 years figuring out how to replicate them.

🥾 George de Mestral hiked on that day with: A) His 90-year-old dad, B) His dog, C) A botanist friend or D) A fondue pot, Swiss chocolate and a yodel? Take a guess, the answer’s hooked at the end. 

🏃 For your joints: I’m on ImproveLife Joint Support, and I feel the difference. Targets cartilage wear, inflammation and joint hydration with five clinically studied ingredients and zero fluff. Now in stock, no wait list. Get up to 50% off and free shipping.** — Kim

⚡ TL;DR

📖 Read time: 3 minutes

Here’s a question most people have never thought about. What happens to your Google account if something happens to you?

Not the cheeriest topic. But it matters more than you might realize.

Google’s Inactive Account Policy says Any account left untouched for two years can be permanently deleted. Gmail. Google Drive. Google Photos. YouTube history. Every file, every email, every photo you’ve ever saved. Gone. Not archived. Not recoverable. Permanently deleted.

Google estimates there are hundreds of millions of inactive accounts. The deletion clock has started on many of them. Maybe yours. That’s why I wanted to tell you about this.

Most people use their main Google account every day. But what about the second account you set up years ago? The Gmail you created for a parent who never fully learned to use it? The old Google Drive folder full of your kids’ earliest photos?

If nobody logs in for two years, Google treats those accounts as abandoned. Abandoned = deleted.

Here’s the harder scenario. What if something happens to you? Without a legacy contact set up, your family cannot access your Gmail, Drive or Google Photos after you’re gone. Not your spouse. Not your kids. Not your attorney. The account locks, then eventually deletes itself.

Five minutes beats a permanent loss.

I checked all of these steps. Depending on your device and operating system, yours might look slightly different. Poke around, you’ll find it.

Google: Go to myaccount.google.com. Click Data and Privacy. Scroll to the bottom and click Make a plan for your digital legacy. This opens Google’s Inactive Account Manager. Set your notification window and designate up to 10 trusted contacts who can access specific parts of your data if your account goes dark.

Apple: Go to Settings > Your Name > Sign-In and Security > Legacy Contact.

Microsoft: Sign in to OneDrive. Go to Settings > Digital legacy. Enter your trusted contact’s email and select Invite.

Extra tech smarts credit: Go to takeout.google.com and download a full backup of every email, photo, document and contact you have. Processing takes about 24 hours. Worth every minute.

Oh, I woke up in thick fog and couldn’t reach my Google drive. The cloud was down.

📩 Send this to someone who thinks all their Google accounts are safe. The links below make it super simple.

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The missing step between having an idea and knowing what it should look like got a whole lot shorter. Google’s free Mixboard tool takes your idea and turns it into a full visual concept board in seconds. For free.

Hit play below so you know what others do. 👇

▶️ Google Mixboard does the creative work →

Or for audio only, click your favorite podcast player below:

🚀 IPO moon math: SpaceX is about to make Alibaba’s old IPO record ($21.8B in 2014) look like a garage sale receipt. Elon Musk’s rocket company filed to go public on Nasdaq as SPCX, looking to raise $75B at a $1.25T valuation (paywall link). SpaceX lost $4.9B last year, but investors are still drooling because rockets, Starlink, X and xAI are all one financial lasagna. The crazy part? Musk’s net worth may cross $1T thanks to his 42.5% equity stake (he also has 83.8% of the voting power). Wow. Just wow.

Apple shoots soccer: Picture 15 videographers scattered around Dignity Health Sports Park holding iPhones like they are filming their nephew’s recital, except it is LA Galaxy vs. Houston Dynamo on Apple TV. See it live Saturday at 7:30 p.m. PT. The whole MLS match will be captured only on iPhone 17 Pros, using those 48-megapixel cameras for in-net shots, player walkouts, warm-ups and crowd footage. This is great marketing with shin guards.

Browser hostage trick: Your browser goes full-screen, the exit button disappears, and suddenly, a fake virus warning is yelling at you. Like a virus in the movies. That’s the recent scareware attack that reached 2.8 million people across the web. Scammers make the page feel locked, so you call their emergency number, where the real infection is a person asking for money or remote access. The fix is boring and beautiful: Force-quit, then reopen without restoring the last session. Again, panic is the product. On Mac: Command + Option + Escape. On Windows: Ctrl + Alt + Delete. Because you get my newsletter, you know.

🔒 Stop guessing your own passwords: How many times have you tried three different logins, only to get locked out? Total waste of time. I use NordPass to create strong passwords and autofill them instantly. I remember one master password. It handles the rest. Get 52% off a 2-year plan. That’s for only $1.43 a month.*

The cover machine: Picture a wedding DJ feeding your favorite breakup song into a polka machine at 1 a.m. That’s where Spotify is headed after its new Universal Music Group deal. Premium subscribers can make legal AI covers and remixes of licensed tracks, choosing the song and style while the system does the musical surgery. Universal gets paid, artists get credited, and nobody has to pretend the bootleg SpongeBob metal version was educational research. Get ready for some weird covers. 

📵 Unplug the suitcase: Get this, people are paying vacation money to make their phones useless. Analog travel is becoming one of the fastest-growing getaway trends, meaning no cell service, no smartphone, printed maps and a real chance of remembering what your own thoughts sound like. Tour companies offering fully offline itineraries say demand has doubled in two years. The funny part? You still need the internet to research your no-internet vacation.

AI found my neighbor an extra $640 a year in credit card rewards. The same can happen to you. Here’s the prompt I used to make it happen.

Listen now on Komando.com →

Or click your favorite podcast player below:

⚡️ 3-second tech genius: Your phone assistant can do more than answer random questions. Say, “Hey, Siri” or “Hey, Google, turn on the flashlight.” Try system controls, too, like “turn Wi-Fi off and mobile data on.” Nothing happening? On iPhone, check Settings > Siri > Talk to Siri. On Android, open Google app > Settings > Gemini > Talk to Gemini hands-free.

📎 Mac can staple PDFs together: Got a bunch of PDFs on the same topic? Select them, right-click, then choose Quick Actions > Create PDF. Your Mac makes one new combined file, leaving the originals untouched. Perfect for manuals, forms or receipts. Once you’ve checked the new document, trash the extras.

⚠️ Stop Windows sharing your bandwidth: “Delivery Optimization” helps Windows grab updates from other PCs and can share yours back out, too. Cool idea, but for most of us, it can slow internet and hog background resources. Turn it off under Settings > Windows Update > Advanced options > Delivery Optimization.

🗺️ Maps that don’t need bars: Heading somewhere with sketchy signal? Organic Maps is a free app made for offline exploring. Download maps on Wi-Fi, then use GPS, voice guidance and turn-by-turn directions without mobile data. It’s detailed with cycling routes, hiking trails and even benches. Get it here.

🎶 Cancel those privileges: Let everyone add songs for the drive or your weekend hangout. On Spotify mobile, open the playlist, tap the three dots at the top and choose Invite collaborators. On Apple Music, open the playlist, tap the Collaboration button and send the invite link.

The future arrived exactly as promised: not with flying cars but with your Uber driver in full REM while a Tesla handles the commute.

One rider caught their driver completely asleep for most of a 20-minute highway trip while Full Self-Driving did literally everything. Stayed in the lane. Took the exit. Rolled to the destination. Solo. The driver reportedly woke up right on cue, like he’d set an internal alarm for “look alive.”

Uber’s terms require drivers to supervise FSD at all times. The car, however, did not get that memo. Watch the whole thing here. Five stars for the car. Jury’s still out on the human.

I guess this Uber driver really ... took his job for a ride.

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🔜 Tomorrow: Your printer may be leaving clues on every page you print. I’ll show you how it works and how to check your own printouts.

Coming up in trivia, a spy plan so bizarre it involved surgery, microphones, Soviet diplomats and one very unwilling agent. 

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🐶 The answer is B) His dog. Specifically, it was an Irish pointer named Milka. George de Mestral and Milka were out hunting in the Swiss Alps when they came back covered in burrs. 

George studied those tiny hook-like structures, got a patent in 1955 and eventually gave birth to Velcro, named from the French words velours (“velvet”) and crochet (“hook”). NASA helped popularize it in the 1960s. Milka, meanwhile, never got royalties. 

Velcro? A total rip-off. (Ha, you didn’t expect that one!) After that, I hope you stick around. But you will. You’re so hooked on this newsletter because of all the fasten-ating stuff. 😉 Drop a rating below and leave a comment. I read every one!

Kim Komando • Komando.com • 510+ radio stations • Trusted by millions daily

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Photo credit(s): ChatGPT/Kim Komando, Arlo, @BoostedBoiKyle via X

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