4 ms·
It could be a dead man's switch. (But I'm really hoping it's not.)
by biohacker42 17y ago
It could be a dead man's switch. (But I'm really hoping it's not.)
- sho 17y agoInteresting point. I wonder how many people actually implement such things?
- biohacker42 17y agoAn acquaintance of mine did. I had moved to a different state. We kept in occasional email contact. And one day I noticed he had deleted his LinkedIn account. Found him in the obituaries, he had passed on a couple of months before. RIP.
- sho 17y agoWow. Thanks for the story. I hadn't heard any concrete examples of people actually doing that. Well yeah. Let's hope it wasn't that.
- mmelin 17y agoIsn't it more likely that a relative simply requested LinkedIn to delete the account? A LinkedIn account doesn't seem relevant to keep online at all after the person has passed away. Facebook, on the other hand, leaves pages up but with most features disabled except for the wall and photos - something I'm unfortunately familiar with.
- paulreiners 17y agoHow exactly do you implement a dead man's switch for your online accounts? Do you just leave your account info for your estate's executor, lawyer, friend, or whatever and he manually deletes them? Or do you have some script that will automatically run and delete your accounts if you don't tell it not to every week or so? I've often what happens to people's free email addresses after they die. (I suppose nothing in most cases.)
- mr_justin 17y agoThese (dead mans switches) are online services which can terminate accounts for you and send emails on your behalf. Some of them work by sending you an email once a month or so to check up on you, if you don't reply, the switch is triggered.
- DougBTX 17y agoReally hope that email doesn't get caught in a spam filter...