Some people have a plan, the digital equivalent of living will, or have chosen "family" option in a password management package such as LastPass or have entrusted a book of passwords to a family member.
But the consequences of doing nothing are not as neutral as some might expect and were spelled out during an informative presentation by Chris Boyd of Malwarebyes at BSides in Manchester on Thursday. The presentation, cheerily titled "The digital entropy of death", covered what could happen to your carefully curated online presence after you log off.
Miscreants are already targeting obviously abandoned profiles. Boyd explained that in some cases it's easier for fraudsters to gain hold of these accounts than the account-holders' relatives, because crooks know the systems better and controls - although present - are often deeply embedded on the sites such as Facebook, Twitter et al.
Alongside regular postings asking for help on Facebook due to compromise of dead people’s logins (examples here and here) there’s also the problem of “cloning”.
"Facebook users have reported receiving friend requests from accounts associated with dead friends and family members," The Independent reports. "Such requests appear to be the result of cloning or hacking scams that see criminals try [to] add people on the site, and then use that friendship as a way of stealing money from them or running other cons."
Social media accounts are, of course, just the tip of the iceberg. Most people these days run 100+ accounts, as figures from password management software apps show. These figures are only increasing over time. Some sites are managing the inevitability of their users shuffling off this mortal coil with features designed to deactivate accounts after months of inactivity or other features, Boyd explained in a recent blog post.
While a lot of services don’t openly advertise what to do in the event of a death on their website, they will give advice should you contact them, whether social network, email service, or web host. When there’s no option available, though, people will forge their own path and take care of their so-called 'digital estate planning' themselves.
[...] Millennials mark the first generation not to know life before an always-on, everywhere internet, which will become the norm from now on. "Younger generations absolutely will demand reforms to the way we think about digital content, ownership, and inheritance," Boyd concluded.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 18 2018, @04:01PM (8 children)
If I die, I would want my social media to disappear. If I didn't hand passwords to my family, why should they sniff through my private stuff? I've left financial papers open to allow my affairs to be wound up, but I won't hand out the passwords to my storage media. I do not want my family reading my email; my death shouldn't give them some sentimental claim to do so.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 18 2018, @04:19PM (6 children)
Understandable. Why should a life-long charade be destroyed after it can no longer be maintained or defended? If I maintained my privacy in life I expect it to continue in death.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 18 2018, @04:32PM (2 children)
Uh...'cause you're dead?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 18 2018, @07:23PM (1 child)
My body, yes. But not my spirit, and not my quest!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 18 2018, @09:26PM
My body isn't, my spirit and my quest are dead as a dodo.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by aristarchus on Saturday August 18 2018, @07:18PM (2 children)
Problem solved. Just don't die. So far, so good.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 18 2018, @09:04PM (1 child)
Or even after death someone else can just come along and assume the online identity, maintaining the charade by writing first-person fan-fiction.
*cough*
(Score: 4, Funny) by aristarchus on Saturday August 18 2018, @09:15PM
*cough* yourself, you young whippersnapper! Is that bronchitis I hear? Could it lead to pneumonia?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 18 2018, @05:32PM
There's plenty of things both legal and illegal that somebody might want private in their life times, but not care about later on. Plus, there's plenty of physical things like sex toys that somebody might not be keen about their relatives finding afterwards.
The big problem is that there's no way of leaving the keys to things that you want unlocked that isn't subject to being seized by the authorities. So, even if you do have a trusted party that won't look at the keys, they may not have a choice if law enforcement comes by and demands access ahead of time because they want to know what's on that encrypted device.
The present situation is that it's basically either or, either you leave it open to that sort of abuse or you have it inaccessible until somebody can brute force it. There is no option to leave it closed until such a time as your dead. I keep all my devices encrypted just because I have no idea what might be considered incriminating several decades down the road. Just look at the current #metoo morons that aren't just sweeping up people that appear to have engaged in criminal wrongdoing, but also people that at worst have poor manners. Aziz Ansari was at most a dick even if you accept everything that woman claimed to be entirely accurate.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 18 2018, @04:02PM (2 children)
When I die accessing all of my my accounts - banks, social media, etc - will be easy for my family because I use the same password for everything: hunter2
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 18 2018, @04:07PM (1 child)
I tried logging in as Anonymous Coward with hunter2 as the password but it didn't work.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Saturday August 18 2018, @05:33PM
Everybody knows that's fake, services require 8 characters, an upper case letter and a number. His real password is probably Hunter22
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 18 2018, @05:28PM
It's all the fault of those incels. If they hadn't designed computers to be inaccessible to women, we wouldn't have these problems. Incels should just kill themselves. If women wrote software, there would be no problems like these. Only an anti-social incel would fail to think of these things.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 18 2018, @10:17PM (1 child)
That's the most pleasing thought of the day.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 18 2018, @10:22PM
When a millennial dies, do all of its little snowflake friends need to head to a safe space?
(Score: 2) by looorg on Saturday August 18 2018, @10:45PM
I would assume that eventually the account(s) just get purged due to a lack of login, or they become giant online depositories of spam since nobody is there to empty them anymore. I have not made any plans to give any accounts away or share any passwords or anything.
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Sunday August 19 2018, @01:26AM (1 child)
the Dread Pirate Roberts?
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday August 19 2018, @01:49AM
My very-latest Online Crusade is to overwhelm https://freeross.org/ [freeross.org] with a far-better SEO site that advocates letting Ross Ulbricht contemplate the error of his ways for a good long time.
Free Ross points out that his charged were all for "non-violent" offenses and that the prosecution didn't identify any victims during his trial.
Somehow Free Ross regards these as exculpatory evidence. I Cry Bullshit On That.
I don't have the time to look through Silk Road's FBI-impounded checkbook register but there is no doubt in my mind that Rossy Boy was facilitating wholesale purchases to drug dealers who quite commonly off to those who say the wrong things to the wrong people.
Actual _direct_ victims would be all those who ODed on the wares that Ulbricht flogged.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday August 19 2018, @01:43AM
If you can find any of your sites' pages in a search for "site:mydomain.tld inurl:viewforum" or "site:mydomain.tld inurl:showtopic" IT IS OF VITAL IMPORTANCE THAT YOU SHUT DOWN INACTIVE THREADS.
I Am Absolutely Serious.
It gets worse: a great many PHP boards are completely _abandoned_. Not just some of their threads - their entire websites.
It's not hard at all for me to turn up all _manner_ of completely cleartext "BBSes" with web search and a few selected keywords that I turned up in my question to bring The Long Arm Of The Law onto every last pedophile in G-d's (or perhaps Satan's) Creation.
So far it's been the most productive to point out to the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center [ic3.gov] that CloudFlare was serving lots of kiddiepr0n with really, really obvious domain names. The specific domains I complained about are gone, but there are lots more I've found since.
I've been puzzling over an automated way to automate the most-obvious keyword-SEO CP domains but I really haven't had the headspace to actually work in it yet.
For Extra Credit: CloudFlare serves lots of malware as well. Surely there is some reason?
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Sunday August 19 2018, @02:20AM
It's in the cloud. So you should be able to take it with you into the afterlife. Hey Google! Are you listening?
In hell they only get usenet. and only one newsgroup: comp.sci.soc.misc.alt.rec.bin
And you must use punched cards.
The amount of rust code in Linux has grown.
The amount of rust code in Linux has groan.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday August 19 2018, @05:28AM
A couple years ago I emailed my entire family to request that they ensure that _all_ of my writing stay online _forever_. By brother-in-law Stan Evans [secomputing.net] told me he'd take care of it. I plan to follow up by mailing all my family "Open When I'm Pushing Up Daisies" with the login credentials of my server as well as detailed instructions for how to maintain it.
I eventually grew to realize that the Internet is really quite fragile: it could be destroyed by even a _limited_ nuclear war, an asteroid strike or by humanity going extinct if Trump Really Truly Does Get His Way With "Beautiful, Clean Coal".
So I've started preparing PDFs from which I'll self-publish - at first at http://lulu.com/ [lulu.com] - dead-tree collections of all my essays, articles, rants and manifestoes.
I'm going to pay for a limited printing with archival acid-free paper - the Declaration Of Independence and the Constitution are both printed on hemp - as well as archival bindings - the pages sewn into the binding, not glued -and will donate them to all the Rare Book Rooms at all the better-known English-speaking Universities.
I'm also going to mail all the regular print editions of my mental illness essays to all the public mental health clinics that I'm able to dig up. In most of the US it's easy because most state mental health department sites list the street addresses of and sometimes link to the sites of their county clinics.
Living with Schizoaffective Disorder [warplife.com] on a reading list it distributes to its county clinics. How cool can that be?)
I'm not much concerned about Social Media but clicking the here and here links in TFP yielded the insight that Facebook can "memorialize" your account when your but-one Tick on the Mortal Coil times out: memorialized FB profiles remain online as read-only archives.
Facebook also offers the option of completely deleting dead folks' profiles as well.
A good friend of mine and a classmate from high-school was well as a truly talented Heavy Metal drummer passed away a few years ago. After he gave up live performances he was accepted to med school, specialized as an Allergist then joined the Army. On his I expect now-memorialized Facebook Wall as a happy, smiling Victor Agnello wearing a modern combat helmet a little ways in front of the open rear bay ramp of a crudely-spraypainted Olive Drab transport plane. (Just now I'm unable to find that particular photo; it was at Laaz Rockit's MySpace page but now it's gone.)
Happy and smiling was Vic's entire Way Of Life: even when he doubted his Catholic faith when were Juniors, he continued to happily smile.
On the very same Laaz Rockit [youtube.com] album that contained the track Shit's Ugly [wikipedia.org], the CD insert expresses the band's gratitude for their parents' support.
I Am Absolutely Serious: "Thanks To Our Parents" is pure, undiluted Vic Agnello.
One time I drove him in my grandfather's beat-up old pickup to the other high school so I could lend him a collapsible platform that he would use as an elevated drum stage later that night. During our shirt journey Vic stuck his head out the window so as to frizz up his Big Hair so he would like his best as he performed.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]