In the last decade, Yahoo, Google, Hotmail-MSN (now Live!) and many other free email (and services) provider sprung up. We liked it and we created our own accounts there; I believe each of us has at least one account at Yahoo, Hotmail and Gmail and some might even have multiple accounts in one services, like me.
We also like privacy and security. So, we created hard-to-guess (though not very strong) passwords to protect our accounts on the web.
Now the problem arises. We human usually live no longer than 100 years (that figure is even exaggerated). Assuming that those who are currently using the web services include 50-year-old people and they will live until 100th year, we will have dead-people accounts on the servers of web service providers. What are Yahoo, Microsoft and Google going to do with the accounts of those people who pass away? A family member might be able to terminate the account. But, do they all know the passwords? If they do not know the passwords, there will be no way to terminate those accounts. As time goes by, in a century, we will have a lot of "dead accounts" which needs to be cleared away.
I am almost certain that the three Big Brothers will not be opening up services that entertain requests from family members of dead people, asking them to shut down the accounts showing the dead certificates. Or Are those family members going to bother to do that at all?
Should Google shut down the accounts which are inactive for at least one year or a particular amount of time? I know Mail2World has a tenure period within which, if the user does not log in, the account will be deactivated. This would not be a problem for the Google to enforce such a term. There is another problem. Should Google let other users to take over the old user names once they have been deleted from the server? If Google makes the used user names available after they are deleted, there is a problem I can think of. The new user who takes over the user name will probably receive emails from those friends of the old user (now passed away) who never knew that he/she has passed away, or from those mailing lists that the old user subscribed. If Google does not make used user names reusable, is there going to be a problem of user name shortage?
What do you think? Please share your views in the comment session.
Thank you for reading.
Until then...
~_~ Justin ~_~