Signing Out of a Gmail or iCloud Account Remotely

So you’ve stayed over at a friend’s house for the weekend, and you used his computer to log in and check your email. No biggie, right? Well, it may very well be if you forgot to actually log out, especially if your friend isn’t above causing mischief to be “funny.” Even worse, if you left your account logged in on a public computer, you’re really asking for trouble. So what do you do? Luckily, both Gmail and iCloud offer very quick and simple ways to log out of other browsers remotely. For Gmail, you’ll just go to mail.google.com, sign in with the proper info, and then when you get to your inbox, you’ll have a little “account activity” prompt near the bottom-right.

Click on the “Details” link there, and the window that pops up will give you all of the recent activity associated with your account, including the IP addresses used. The “Sign out of all other web sessions” button near the top is gonna do what we’re talking about in this tip…

…but as Google will warn you once you do so, it’s very important that you go ahead and change your password if there’s a location you don’t recognize in your recent activity or if you think someone may have your credentials.

For iCloud email (addresses that end with me.com, mac.com, or iCloud.com), the process is just as easy. Visit iCloud.com and sign in with the account in question first, and then click the big ol’ “Settings” button.

Scroll to the bottom of the subsequent screen and click on “Sign Out Of All Browsers.”

Note that doing this resets the “trust” settings in your browsers, so if you’ve got two-step verification turned on, you’ll have to send a four-digit code to one of your trusted devices to log in properly again. But hey, that trouble is sure worth not worrying about your email account being logged in on someone else’s computer, right?

And finally, if you decide that the security breach is bad enough that you need to change the password for the Apple ID you signed into, a link to do that is near the top of that same “Settings” page:

That’ll take you right to appleid.apple.com, which is where you can change that password, edit the information associated with your account (like your phone number or address), and see which devices you’re signed into. 

That’s, uh, a lot of things. Send help, because I obviously need it.