Many people will have a phone contact for use in a crisis or emergency, but it can often be difficult for these emergency contacts to gain access to all of the relevant details to administer online accounts in the owner’s absence.
For Personal Premium, Family and LastPass Teams users, there’s a very important, and potentially very useful feature – Emergency Access.
You set an emergency contact – someone you trust to use your accounts in the event that you cannot – who has their own LastPass account. The trusted user must accept your invitation to become an emergency contact. Then, you choose a wait time – if your emergency contact requests access to your data, the wait time is the amount of time that must pass without a response from you before they are given access to your vault. You can respond and deny or revoke access to the person within this time frame.
The same security applies to data accessed this way as to any other LastPass information. The reason that the emergency contact must have a LastPass account is that in the event of them requesting access to your data, your key will be sent to them, encrypted in a way only their own key can decrypt, allowing them access to your data without compromising their security, or yours.
For obvious reasons, we would only recommend offering this kind of access to someone you would trust with all of your accounts and personal information, including things like medical and financial details – your trusted contact will gain access to all of your vault information, including notes and any attached images or stored files.
Members of the same family account can add each other as trusted contacts if they choose to; business or team users can choose trusted colleagues to administer their accounts.
You can review LastPass’ official blog on the topic (from 2016), by clicking here.
