Death Regulation

It’s a topic that has been lightly touched on sev­eral times over the years. The tales of fam­i­lies try­ing to regain con­trol of deceased fam­ily mem­bers emails or blogs etc, but it has never been put forth that a seri­ous solu­tion is needed.

With the pass­ing of mom, I was lucky in that she used the same pass­word for every­thing and that I knew the pass­word. Allow­ing me to go in and take care of things, archive emails etc. For exam­ple, my fam­ily has a lit­tle used fam­ily mail­ing list through YahooGroups and I wanted to reclaim con­trol of it for our use but I didn’t want the red tape that would be required to get through for them to take care of it. So I instead logged in as her and switched con­trol as needed.

There is some­thing eerie about log­ging in to her email or to her yahoo groups and see­ing the pile of mes­sages from her knit­ting group, or things like that. I was struck with the ques­tion — do I remove her from these groups? Or do I let her account sit there? It’s a very deep and philo­soph­i­cal question.

On the one hand, many prob­a­bly don’t even notice the idle account on the list, but on the other hand I don’t want mom’s email address con­tin­u­ally get­ting these emails because there is a sense that you should take care of these sort of things, just like stop­ping mail to a vacant house. Gmail will con­tinue to expand her box and it’s unlikely her account will ever fill up, but there is just some­thing about it that both­ers me.

So how should sites like Google, Yahoo, Face­book or Myspace han­dle the death of mem­bers? What about World of War­craft play­ers or other MMOs? Or on an even more impor­tant level, how about domain reg­is­trars? It must be a solu­tion which is fool-proof safe from pranksters as well. Is it sim­ply a pro­ce­dure for han­dling the sub­mis­sion of death certificates?

The lib­er­tar­ian in me cries out in pain as I con­sider this sug­ges­tion: Is it some­thing the gov­ern­ment should reg­u­late? I need to think more about this.