What Happens to Your Online Accounts When You Die

You're a web designer, you have 22 Gmail accounts, 13 Yahoo Messenger accounts, 50,000 MySpace contacts and 26,000 Facebook friends. You just finished Tweeting about your ham and egg breakfast, you choked from your orange juice that contained your cat's favorite yarn ball - you die. What would ever happen to your online accounts now? Will your accounts be automatically deleted, or will your Facebook account automatically send an update that "Mr. Online Guy has just died". Luckily, people from MakeUseOf were actually thinking about it and made a research which concludes:

If you die, your accounts will most likely stay active unless the site automatically deletes the account due to inactivity, or your family has requested the account to be closed. Most sites allow access to your personal data by your next of kin, but to gain this right, they will need to mail proof to the website. Even though you may have died, if you use one password for all these sites, your family members might be able to use that password, or even guess your secret question. But then again, when you die, would you even care what people find in your email inbox or social networking sites?

If you are trying to access a deceased person’s email, try resetting their email, look to see if they have stored the password in a file, or see if they have written it down on paper.

They have outlined the process how your emails and social network accounts will be deleted or can be accessed by your relatives. They included some of the most popular services such as Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, Facebook and MySpace.

Visit this very interesting article here. So, from now on, make sure you include in your final deeds that you would like a memorial page for your Facebook account. ;)