I deal with recurring suicidal thoughts but I'm not planning anything right now and I don't know if I ever will. That uncertainty is the problem. If something happened suddenly, I don't want my family accessing my phone, laptop, social media, saved passwords, search history, etc.
At the same time, I don't want to delete everything now and then stay alive and regret it.
Any ideas?
Ps: I use Windows and Android
I agree with
@cakedog. You can encrypt your computer. It's quite easy to do on Windows. It won't slow the computer down. It doesn't affect performance, because the encryption algorithm is supported by hardware. The only difference is that if you forget your PIN or password, you lose your data.
Regarding the phone, any modern phone has built-in data encryption already at the OS level. The phone 'unlocks' the data when it boots up. If you want to make sure no one can access your phone, power it down. Doing that makes it virtually impossible to break into the phone, unless someone can guess your PIN. Brute-forcing it doesn't work either, because phones use hardware-based encryption, which prevents this. It's not like the old days or in movies where the police can just hook it up to a device and unlock it. Such things don't exist anymore. The key is to power the phone down and not just lock it.
The biggest risk is not your computer or phone, but your accounts and passwords. Your friends or relatives might initiate the password recovery process on your accounts and access your data stored in the cloud. You can prevent this by using two-factor authentication, which usually raises an account to a higher security level. It isn't just about the login process per se. If 2FA is turned on, service providers take it as a sign that you care about security, and usually make password recovery harder. You can also enter fake birthdates or tricky answers to security questions. However, this can be dangerous if you need to recover your password yourself.
