The account isn’t closed automatically .. yahoo / google etc certainly don’t
know if one of their account users is alive or dead.
If the account isn’t logged in for 3 months or so it goes inactive. Then after
6..9 months of inactivity all mail in it is purged and the account remains
dormant / not receiving any email, mailbox empty etc. After a few years -
periodically - these purged and inactive accounts are cleared out.
And when someone dies - their pc might have a yahoo messenger client with his
credentials stored - and if someone else in the guy's family boots the PC up,
well, yahoo messenger starts up too. And if the pc has a virus, that account is
hijacked to send out spam (mostly for diet pills judging by the spam I've got
so far).
The short cut for that is for the account holder's next of kin to mail a copy
of the death certificate to yahoo, and ask that the account be closed.
srs
-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Udhay
Shankar N
Sent: Friday, 10 July 2009 12:04 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [silk] See you on the other side
A slightly more tawdry, but almost equally creepy, version of something
we've discussed before here [1] - messages (seemingly) from beyond the
grave.
I logged into my various IM accounts after several days, and was greeted
by an offline message advertising some dubious site, purportedly from a
friend. A perfectly ordinary occurrence - lots of people have their
accounts cracked and used to send spam messages. Only, this particular
friend died last month.
It got me wondering, what are the policies at various sites, such as
yahoo and google, for account-holders who die? What happens to their data?
Udhay
[1] http://groups.yahoo.com/group/silk-list/message/1241
--
((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com))
