While not a solution to the issue of not wanting to bring it up beforehand, which is less a technical issue and more a social one, a possible solution to not wanting to provide access until death would be to follow the normal, current process, but once the emergency access is granted and the emergency user has a password set up, have that password disabled entirely, i.e. they can’t even try to use it to access the account and trigger the notification to the account owner, until one of two things happens (either an option or just whichever the developers determine is the best solution):
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A certain amount of (ideally user-configurable) time has passed without access to the account, at which point emails (again, ideally the number and timespan, i.e. 3 every week, so once a week for 3 weeks, would be user-configurable) would be sent to the account holder notifying them the emergency contact will soon be notified they can request access. Once that total time has passed without response by the account owner, the emergency contact will be notified, and they can request access and wait for approval, denial, or no-response default approval as is currently the setup. This is basically like Gmail’s inactive account setting, only with the need to set it up ahead of time with the emergency contact.
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Do the same as in the first solution, having an emergency contact set up a password which is disabled until activated later, only in this case the method of activating it is different. In order for that to happen, an additional one or more passwords or keyfiles need to be used to activate the emergency user’s password (or, in other words, for their password to work to access the account), and these could be given to lawyers, other family members, etc. This is just one more reason why keyfiles should be added to Bitwarden as requested here. In fact, this solution does deal with the issue of not wanting to discuss this ahead of time with family, as the emergency user can be a lawyer and the additional password(s)/keyfile(s) can be given to family, (an)other lawyer(s), kept in a safe place, etc. Something as simple as a keyfile or secret password can really open up the possibilities for dealing with this.