Last updated: 23 December 2014
Securing your social network profiles today is as important as locking the front door when you leave the house. Increasingly the gateway to our lives online, social media behemoths Facebook, Google+ and Twitter in particular are impacting how we sign-in to all kinds of online services. You may have noticed the ‘Sign in with Twitter/Facebook’ button appearing on a growing number of websites in the past year. In fact, after six straight quarters of falling behind in the social login sphere, Facebook has bounced back to take over the top spot, closely followed by Google.
User convenience underlines how important these services have become in both our personal and working lives, which begs the question, what happens to a social media profile when the owner can no longer access it? Imagine all your photos stored in the cloud, locked away from the people that treasure them most.
Delaware recently became the first state in the US to pass a law that ensures families’ rights to access the digital assets of loved ones after death, just as if those assets were physical objects. As the law details, ‘digital assets such as email, cloud storage, social media accounts, health records, content licenses, databases and more are deemed a part of a person’s estate upon death’. Peace of mind I’m sure, especially if half of your life is currently stored online (like mine). Of course, being such a complex and sensitive subject, it isn’t all that straightforward, as Lisa Vaas explains in her article on the Naked Security blog.
Facebook has responded to this question by introducing Facebook memorial pages, Twitter has recently committed to removing images of the deceased as requested by their family, and as we’ve mentioned on the blog before, Google has what it calls Inactive Account Manager.
If the rumoured Facebook payments plug-in happens, or people are able to pay with a Tweet, the safety and future of social networks will have even more prominence in the digital security world. When it comes to living life online, digital graveyards will play an important role in the history books of the future, providing they are secure.
