Most of us love our social networks; they connect like minded people from all the corners of the globe. We use them to share ideas, chat and stay in touch with people. They make the world a smaller place to live.
Social networking is a massive phenomena, around two thirds of the world's population have social networking accounts, some people spend a huge amount of time online and some people don't use their accounts for months on end, their accounts are waiting for them when they want them. But what happens to the accounts if they aren't used again? Do they close after a time? If so, after how long? The answer to this is no they don't; they stay open until the accounts are closed.
I know this to be true as I have personal experience with it. Just over three years ago my brother died suddenly. He was a young man, with a young family and he used the social networks the same way most of us do, for career advancement, meeting like minded people and staying touch with family and friends. The tributes and well wishes written and left on his social networking sites were touching, heartfelt and brought a great deal of sympathy to his family. Slowly people began to unfriend him, letting him go and saying goodbye in their way. A few could not let go and would not unfriend him, this may well have kept his accounts alive, and I have no way of knowing whether his accounts would have closed naturally if they had. Either way, just under three years had passed and his accounts were still active. It was time to close them, time for us as a family to be able to move on. He can never be replaced, he will never be forgotten, he remains in our hearts but the future calls and it is time to move forward.
Once we had decided we wanted the accounts closed, I set about working out how we could achieve our goal. Some of these sites have no customer service to contact, no one to explain the circumstances to. They do all have one thing in common though, the email address. The email address is used to setup all of our social networking sites and which all updates and notifications are sent to. The email address is where password reminders are sent if we forget our log in details. His email address was the key to unlocking all of his social networking accounts, if I could access his email account I would gain access to everything else. I contacted his email provider via email, as again there was not customer service contact telephone number, telling them who I was and stating my issues. I didn't really expect they would be able to help as there are data protection issues and regulations contravening what I was asking for. They did email me back with a reference number and a contact telephone number. I called their contact centre and was able to provide them with sufficient information and proof that they were able to perform a transfer of ownership of his email address to me. They were supposed to write to me with details on how to gain access to his account, they never did, but they must have reactivated his email address, because I was able to gain access to the reset password, guess his security question answers and reset his password. I was now in to his email account. From this point I was able to reset the passwords on all of his social networking accounts and one by one I closed them down.
As a person who has worked and lived the technology for over 20 years, I had never considered what would happen to my accounts after I'm gone. My security is reasonable and I don't share my passwords with other people and they are not remembered on my computer. I have, however, as a direct result of this, put together an envelope with instructions for my family which includes a card with a list of my social networking accounts, email addresses and their passwords. I will need to remember to keep this up to date, but it provides a good place to start and more than I had to go on.
I closed the last one on the anniversary of his death, after I made one last post on his wall, Goodbye, love always, your big sis xxxx
