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Been working through the accounts of a deceased family member over the past few years. They left a password file that made its way to me so I’m able to log in t
by snowwrestler 2y ago
Been working through the accounts of a deceased family member over the past few years. They left a password file that made its way to me so I’m able to log in to most things “as them.” My goal is to harvest anything the family might want as a memory: messages, photos, etc., and to clean up (close) all their accounts to prevent identity theft.
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.
- camkego 2y ago> No one sends more fucking email than politicians. Isn’t it nice how politicians excluded themselves from most of the rules regulating businesses regarding spam and email laws.
- BrandoElFollito 2y agoIn the US, I guess. Here in France we never get emails from any candidates, this is against the law (not specifically for politicians, for everything)
- rvnx 2y agoIn France it's totally fine to send spam emails during elections, maybe you just got lucky ? There are even auto-calls https://www.ouest-france.fr/elections/presidentielle/presidentielle-les-candidats-ont-ils-le-droit-de-m-appeler-ou-de-m-envoyer-un-sms-18333aee-b5b0-11ec-a299-c9106b4183f5 https://www.ouest-france.fr/elections/presidentielle/preside... "Hello this is Eric Zemmour" > Soit vous avez indiqué votre numéro de téléphone sur un formulaire à destination du parti ou du candidat, soit il s’est procuré votre numéro en achetant ou en louant une base de données – contenant votre numéro – auprès d’une société privée. So it can be basically any source.
- throw0101d 2y ago> In France it's totally fine to send spam emails during elections, maybe you just got lucky ? In the US, when are things not in 'election mode'?
- jamesu 2y agoNot having a proper account deletion method for deceased persons was one of my big pet peeves when sorting out accounts of a family member.
- dylan604 2y ago>No one sends more fucking email than politicians. LinkedIn enters the chat. I have given up trying to turn off email notifications from LinkedIn. One of the last acts I did with my FB account was to finally get it to stop sending emails, yet LI refuses to stop.
- hsbauauvhabzb 2y agoLinkedIn mobile app adds new notification classes and assumes you opt in, even if you’ve opted out of all the other spam. However, email from LinkedIn is not something I’ve had an issue with, personally.
- RataNova 2y agoAnd just another example of how systems aren't really designed with death in mind
- technothrasher 2y ago> I ended up paying to keep the deceased’s phone number active for a while I've ported a few numbers that I wanted to keep for a bit without needing the cell plan any longer to a Google Voice account. Then I just forward the number to my own cell phone.
- lioeters 2y ago> keep the deceased’s phone number active for a while I wish I had known this. After my father passed away a few years ago, I had a password list but some accounts required 2FA, and unfortunately I didn't have access to his phone. It locked me out of some services where I would have liked to have archived the data, like photos and posts. At some point though, data is similar to material possessions - someone has to spend the effort of keeping it archived and accessible. Eventually people move on and the data is either forgotten or lost. And it's OK to let it go, nothing lasts forever.
- ed_elliott_asc 2y agoI’m in the UK and I managed to end up on trumps subscription list begging for money