Enable Emergency Access

Emergency Access is a feature available to you that allows a trusted contact to request access to your vault in case of an emergency. The uses of this feature are twofold:

1. Allow a trusted contact to gain access to your vault in the event that you are unable to due to an emergency
2. Regain access to your account via the trusted account in the event you've forgotten your master password

Enabling this feature is a 3 step process - invitation, acceptance, and confirmation.

Invite

1. Login to https://mypassword.care and navigate to Settings -> Emergency Access
2. Click "Add emergency contact"
3. Type in the email address of the emergency contact
4. Choose the access method for the emergency contact
   1. View: This contact will be able to request access to view your vault, but not make changes to it
   2. Takeover: this contact will be able to reset your account with a new master password and gain full access to the account
5. Choose how long the trusted contact is required to wait before automatic access is granted. The wait time is 7 days by default. If you do not respond to the request within the specified time frame, then the emergency contact will be automatically granted access to your account
6. Click "Save"

An email will be sent to the specified address. Instruct your emergency contact to check their inbox for an email from no-reply@mypassword.care titled "Emergency access for <your-email-address>". The instructions to accept this request are presented in the email.

Accept

Once your emergency contact has been invited, they will receive an email with instructions to accept the invitation. Notably, they will need to create an account at mypassword.care in order to accept the invitation. They will be walked through the account setup process after clicking the Accept button in their email.

Confirm

After the emergency contact has accepted the invitation, return to the Emergency Access screen to confirm their invitation.

1. Locate the emergency contact on the page - they will have an "Accepted" badge next to their name
2. Click on the three dots menu in the Options column and choose "Confirm"
3. Verify the user's fingerprint phrase matches - your emergency contact can view their fingerprint phrase by logging into their account and navigating to Settings -> My account. (The fingerprint phrase is used as a unique, permanent, publicly-sharable identifier for Vaultwarden accounts)
4. Click "Confirm"

The emergency contact will now have the permission to view or takeover your vault in case of emergency.