What happens to your online accounts when you die?

A few notes of interesting things I’ve found:

Observing inbound mail for over a year is by far the best way to learn where a person has accounts. I found a ton of services that weren’t listed in the password file by seeing “year end summary” or “we’ve updated our terms” emails. And then of course email access is useful to reset the password and get in.

No one sends more fucking email than politicians. It’s honestly insane how many emails came in daily to this account from all sorts of a candidates, from all over the country. The email list sharing is blatant and rampant. And without regular pruning (unsubscribing, marking as spam), the volume just grows and grows.

Some companies have very handy “close and delete this account” features. Some let you end a paid subscription, but there’s no way to remove the account. In one case I killed a subscription to a paper and then was able to log in as the deceased 4 years later! But many services do prune: in many cases, trying to log in years later failed.

When there was not a “delete account” feature, I filed a support request to delete, explaining that the account holder had passed away. When that did not work I filed a legal request to delete personal data, citing the data privacy law of the state in which the deceased resided. That worked well.

I ended up paying to keep the deceased’s phone number active for a while because I kept finding accounts that were set to send SMS codes to permit login. The deceased was good about security, which ended up costing me, ha. Notably, the mobile provider never cut off the number or seemed to notice that a dead person’s phone was still active. As long as the bill gets paid, they don’t look too closely I guess.

I keep a list of services I closed or asked for my account to be removed and forgot. Today you even often have to make an account to take a look at a tech demo, because the author tries to avoid abuse of their AI service key they used for such demo.

After about two years many of these services start sending me messages again. Sometimes it turns out that the account is active again.

Recently a recruiter send me an email with a standard cold call: "I have a position that will be a perfect fit for you". I asked where she got my contact and how's that position be a perfect fit, trying to get a feel what she actually knows about me. She said she got the my profile from LinkedIn. When I asked her to post me a link to my profile it turned out the profile was closed. Somehow LI kept the profile and shared my details when she used some recruiter features. ;)

I die tomorrow, I don’t think you really MUST save my stuff, especially anything digital. If I haven't already shared it with you, it's not yours to have.

Anything important like bank accounts can already be accessed by family with a death certificate; everything else, doesn't matter.

What happens to my online accounts after I die? None of my business, I'm dead.

[0] https://bitwarden.com/help/emergency-access/

Death and grief are challenging experiences and I certainly don't want to diminish anyone's suffering. That said, I prefer to take the opposite approach and acknowledge that digital ephemera are truly not very important, with the small exception of a relatively short period (<10 years) after your death. I don't exactly have a "solution" in mind, but I reject the notion that we should preserve online artifacts forever as part of an individual's legacy.

I don't think the author was necessarily suggesting that online artifacts should be preserved forever, but this line stuck out to me and I felt that I didn't agree with the sentiment.

Oh well.

I kind of wish there was an inactive account setting as default, where every account was disabled after 1 year of inactivity (but keept the user name to prevent squatting), then sent a yearly reminder and deleted them after 10 years or something.

but thanks for making me smile.