Its complicated but people were guessing the right thing. In effect, if something isn't updated that should be, I am assumed compromised and things start to happen. This isn't specific to a will or mortality. I just don't want people to wait until I have been missing for weeks before someone lifts a finger. :-)

It's probably one of those "dead-man-switches", where if OP doesn't do some action before the timer goes off, then it fires off those notifications to his friends (in this case).

So OP has to regularly do some action until they can't (either aren't able to, or are dead in this case).