14 DAY TRIAL // With increasing numbers of people connecting to social media networks, a new phenomenon is rising, and that is the “online death.” That is to say, when individuals who play online games or are involved in communities such as Flickr, MySpace, Facebook and the likes die in real life, their accounts remain hanging, and guild- or group-colleagues have no idea what happened. More and more members of these circles now think up novel ways of letting others know that they've died, and even a small industry has appeared, which allows persons to use online services that automatically notify a pre-defined e-mail list of a user's death.
There are, for instance, sites where people can set up an e-mail list, and then the service automatically sends out notifications of the user's death to the individuals on it, in case the person doesn't log into that account for more than a designated period of time. If, for example, one fails to log in for more than a month, then the service sends pre-defined e-mails to others, informing the online community of one of its members' passing away.
Just a few years ago, this would have seemed something taken out of a science-fiction book, but now it has become an increasingly-present reality. Some people leave all their personal data (as in account names and passwords) to their loved ones on USB drives, to be used in the event of their death. Those are the individuals who don't put their close ones in a very unpleasant situation, as they would have to figure out these passwords for themselves otherwise. And not only games and social media sites passwords are left behind, but also those for bank accounts and other such services.
Some sites are less morbid than those requiring periodic log-ins, in that people setting up accounts on them have to give their personal information to a member of the family, so as to ensure that the other person can access the e-mail lists left behind by the deceased and start the notification process. But these are the fortunate cases. Some individuals do not simply choose as passwords terms such as a pet's name, or a birthday, but use complicated strings of both numbers and letters, which are not easy to crack.