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Comment by nostromo | Hacker News Reader

A story from a friend:

His friend died and all of his accounts went silent along with some grieving notes.

Then, a few months later, the deceased's account was compromised by a spammer. Posts from a spammer posing as a dead friend is about the worst kind of spam I can imagine.

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A friend of mine passed away rather abruptly. A year and a half later his last.fm account started showing him as playing music, and this was picked up by facebook through some app. A friend of his had turned his old sound system back on (he was a DJ) and was using it, having no idea it was scrobbling the tracks back.

Much better than a scammer, but still kind of a weird experience.

A similar thing happened to me on steam. A friend who was much older than myself stopped playing games when he had his third child and we lost touch. His account stayed inactive for around 2 and a half years before it was taken over by someone. Unfortunately what was a reminder of an old friendship is now a banned account with a default avatar and a ridiculous name. It's sad that the account will always be tainted now. It was exciting to think he'd come back, only to investigate and find out it wasn't him.

Now that the account is banned I don't know if I'll ever be able to reconnect with him.

I've seen this happen before as well. I wonder if it would help to have a mechanism that basically removes the user's ability to log in but preserves their data.

Facebook actually has an option to "memorialize" accounts: https://www.facebook.com/help/150486848354038

What does memorialize mean? My father died some years ago and his account is still there, so I'm curious.

The most important thing it does is remove them from suggest a friend requests list which can be very disturbing to receive.

'John wants to connect with you', Oh that's cool, wtf?! John's dead?!

According to [0]

>Depending on the privacy settings of the deceased person's account, friends can share memories on the memorialized timeline

I'd love to know which Privacy Settings control this ability, it's interesting they don't specifically call out the relevant option.

[0] https://www.facebook.com/help/www/103897939701143?rdrhc

It's probably "allow friends to post on my wall" (or anyone).

This WSJ video is a good overview of what happens in different social media when the user dies - http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2013/08/14/when-you-die-does-you...

I still have a dead (as of 15 months ago) friend's facebook account in my contacts in case his family (none of whom I knew) wish to contact people again (it is through accessing his account there that they let us know what we had heard/guessed was true and let us know what the funeral arrangements were.

I've had to reduce the size of the "contacts" square on my Windows phone though as the larger sizes it flashes up pictures culled from various address books and for some reason picked his more regularly than anyone else's and having his face pop up almost every time I looked at my phone felt a tad odd.

That probably won't happen unless either he had his FB password written down somewhere in his will (if any), or if FB gives access to accounts of the deceased to relatives - which, I can imagine, would be a big hassle for FB.

It wouldn't be a bad idea to take up instructions for one's online life in one's will; Facebook accounts to make announcements on and close, domain names to transfer or disband, projects to close / reassign, online contacts to inform, etc.

I should get to that actually. If I died, nobody of the close friends I have online would have any way of knowing, and the RL people I know (few as they are) don't know them either.

> That probably won't happen

It did happen: he left details of how to get into his key store (which included his facebook password) where family could find it.

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