Thinking about if there is any good pattern for how to handle the social media accounts of people who die.
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Thinking about if there is any good pattern for how to handle the social media accounts of people who die. I have been online in some form for 30+ years and my various social networks (especially Facebook but also LinkedIn) and sadly even here have a lot of connections to accounts of people who have died. Not all networks offer good tools for heirs to decide how to handle these accounts (and to handle people cloning or taking over accounts if deleted).
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I think that making the usernames of deceased account owners available for use by others is unambiguously a bad idea.
There's I guess a more challenging space with reusing phone numbers, which nominally aren't tied to identity yet actually have become the primary identifier used by *lots* of online accounts. That's a problem even for people who just need to change their phone numbers for whatever reason.
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@dynamic it’s a really hard problem. Names (whether chosen social media handles or legal names) are not unique but social media has made “claiming” them a race - or in some cases an auction. And trademarks don’t make this any easier as trademarks technically are specific to a particular area of commerce (ie Apple computers vs Apple Records) but social media handles have made that challenging as well.
(Domains kinda solve this by massive expansion of top level domains but that’s messy)