Things you want deleted before anyone looks

First, what cannot be done

Nobody can reach into your phone from outside and delete chosen photos. A modern phone is locked and its contents are scrambled until the passcode is entered. A cloud account answers only to whoever signs in. A service that says it will wipe your devices when you die would have to hold your passwords in a form it can read, and you would be trusting it with everything.

SuddenGone does not do that and cannot: what you store with us is sealed so that we are unable to read it. What follows are the three things that do work.

1. Settings to turn on while you are alive

The phone and the cloud can delete things by themselves, on a timer. Set these once. Menus move, so if a step does not match what you see, search the app's help for the name of the setting.

• Messages that disappear. Signal, WhatsApp and Telegram can all delete messages after a set time, for one chat or for every new chat. On an iPhone, the Messages settings let you keep texts for 30 days or a year instead of forever.
• Search and location history. In your Google Account, under Data and privacy, you can have web activity, location history and YouTube history deleted automatically after a few months.
• An account that removes itself. Google's Inactive Account Manager can delete your whole Google account after it has gone unused for a period you choose. See legacy settings.
• Browser history. Most browsers can clear history each time they close, and private windows keep none.
• A phone that erases itself after wrong guesses. An iPhone can be set to erase after ten failed passcode attempts, and many Android phones have a similar setting. Think before using it if your family will need what is on the phone.

The catch is that these delete things for you too, while you are alive. Use them for what you truly do not need to keep.

2. A person who goes first

For everything a timer cannot handle, you need a person. The usual choice is a close friend rather than a relative: someone steady, who will do exactly what the list says and not read along.

In SuddenGone it works like this.

1. You mark one of the people you named as the one who goes first.
2. You write a private clean-up list: what to deal with, exactly where it is, what to do, and the passcode or sign-in they will need. Only that person's envelope will ever contain this list. Your family's envelopes do not.
3. At release, that person's envelope opens first. Everyone else's waits.
4. When they have finished, they press a button to say so. The others' envelopes then open, with the phone passcode and everything else you left for them.
5. If the first person never says they are finished, the others' envelopes open anyway after the wait you chose, seven days unless you change it. Nobody is left locked out.

Tell this person now that you have asked it of them. The request should not be a surprise in a hard week.

Writing a list a friend can follow

• Name the device or account, and where the device physically is.
• Give the path, tap by tap. "Photos, Albums, Hidden, select all, delete. Then empty Recently Deleted."
• Say what to keep, if anything, and who it goes to.
• Remember the copies. Deleting from the phone does not delete from the cloud backup, and the other way round. List both.
• Say what happens to the device afterwards: hand it to a named person, or wipe it.

Wiping a whole phone from a distance

If you would rather the entire phone were erased, the person who goes first can do it without touching it. Apple's Find My and Google's Find My Device each have an erase option. It needs your account sign-in, which goes on their list, and the phone has to be switched on and connected for the erase to reach it.

Weigh this carefully. It removes everything on the phone, including photos and contacts your family may want and the text messages that carry sign-in codes for your other accounts. It does not touch what is stored in the cloud, which has to be dealt with separately. And an erased phone usually stays tied to your account until it is removed from it, so add that step if the phone is to be passed on.

3. Things that are never handed over

Some entries you may keep in your envelope only for your own use. In SuddenGone you can mark any entry "never hand this over". It stays readable to you, and at release it is destroyed unread. It never appears in anyone's envelope.

A fair warning

• Deleting is final. If in doubt, leave something for one person's eyes only instead of destroying it.
• Keep this to what is private and yours. Financial records, business records and anything that matters to a dispute or to settling your estate should not be on a delete list, and asking someone to destroy them could put that person in a difficult position.
• Photos are the thing families most regret losing. Be specific about which ones.