This is a site to help you "delete your account" - however this does not delete your data or your digital footprint.....
This site provides a guide to resetting some factory defaults on your mobile before you recycle it - again take care, deep techies can still recover some of the data, but mr joe public will not be able to.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/18/technology/18death.html
This is a difficult topic, how do we deal with accounts of users who die. Who’s owns their IPR, should you login and delete the account. I have written serval times about legacy and death, but as I am writing some ‘new’ social rules for our digital age and this one is very hard and any ideas would be welcome.
Changing name may be only way to escape previous online activity reports Carrie-Ann Skinner of PC Advisor
“Young web users may be need to change their names when they become adults in a bid to distance themselves from content previously posted online about them” Google CEO Eric Schmidt told the Wall Street Journal: "I don't believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time." "I mean we really have to think about these things as a society. I'm not even talking about the really terrible stuff, terrorism and access to evil things."
Schmidt also told the newspaper the search engine is "trying to figure out what the future of search is".
"I mean that in a positive way. We're still happy to be in search, believe me. But one idea is that more and more searches are done on your behalf without you needing to type."
He says that at present "we know roughly who you are, roughly what you care about, roughly who your friends are". The search engine also knows your location, which according to the WSJ, means if you need milk and there's a place nearby to get milk, Google will remind you to get milk.
"I actually think most people don't want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next."
However, social media consultant Suw Charman-Anderson told the BBC, the problem was not as great as Schmidt believes. "There's always a lag between the introduction of new technology and the development of a set of social norms around the behaviour that the technology encourages."
She said the idea that everything is stored online is not true and it will be quite some time before that can become true "because of the enormity of the internet".
"As a society, we are just going have to become a bit more forgiving of the follies of youth."
However, many women are now considering keeping their maiden names rather that changing to their husbands to maintain their professional digital reputation, I suppose it all depends what you need to hide !
From: Sean Dockray A roadmap for an effective Facebook suicide should do some of the following: catching as many viruses as possible; click on as many ?Like? buttons as possible; join as many groups as possible; request as many friends as possible. Wherever there is the possibility for action, take it, and take it without any thought whatsoever. Become a machine for clicking! Every click dissolves the virtual double that Facebook has created for you. It disperses you into the digital lives of others you hadn?t thought of communicating with. It confuses your friends. It pulls all those parts of the world that your social network refuses to engage with back into focus, makes it present again. Other alternatives:- - stick to facebook and provide rubbish data. “database vandalism!” - "fakebook" where you do not use your real name and fill your profile with nonsense information.
So you have got yourself into a digital mess. Pictures that are not fitting for the new image, blog posts that are not so in thinking with the new role, friends who are just links and you need it all cleaned up.
Alas life coaches and other ‘social engineers’ are re-branding and emerging with a promise that they will come and save you. The guarantee is that they will clean it all up and start again….
Please don’t fall for anyone who promises to clean up your digital past. Just a quick change of name, a new profile or a new privacy setting is not the answer, neither is deleting, re-starting, clearing cookies or buying a new computer as this is only the data that is in your control. The content you need to think about is what others have said about you, not what you say about yourself.
Thinking further about the Greenpeace cloud paper where their emphasis is on the type of electricity production that powers the cloud. In my view they should open up another attack angle that will have a different effect. They rightfully acknowledge that efficiency gains from technology advancement will reduce energy requirement but I don't think they look at what is possible with a bit of old fashion price/demand theory.
I agree that one prime focus of attack should be the move to sustainable energy and away from coal/gas, however, I would argue that an equally important focus should be on straight forward reduction. But how do you encourage less use of a free cloud service.
Every new consumer of cloud applications or new user adds new demands for computing, storage and power, every active existing user also increases demands and all in-active users, have an energy consumption that remains a constant bleed on the system.
The area where I think there is some thought needed is on ageing data and in-active users. How can cloud companies could use pricing to remove inactive accounts and moved aged data to dark (zero energy consumption) storage reducing demands, as well as moving to more sustainable energy sources.
This post focuses on consumer, business cloud thinking needs more than a train journey home…..
Case 1. Users want access to old data - in this case let us assume that data from 1996 is archived off to dark storage. If the disk has to be powered up, the user has to pay. This is the application of a very blunt instrument to allow companies to reduce their backlog of digital data. Rather like going to a library and looking up an old newspaper article on a microfiche.
Case 2. Users want to keep an inactive account. A user signs up for a slideshare or youtube account and eventually they move to vimeo and Scribe instead. If they want to keep the old account, after a period inactivity, they have to pay or the Service Provider can delete/ dark archive.
Case 3. Users want their entire history always immediately available. So here the crunch. Many are worried about an old discretion coming back to haunt you. Imagine Facebook continues to deliver the service for free, but free is only the last 12 months of data. If you want to keep older data active on spinning energy consuming disks you pay, or off it goes (access is still possible case 1). A potential employer now has to pay for access to your old data, putting a little barrier up.
Case 4. My Digital Footprint data. Please can I have all my old data back to put on my own server, centralised, and you can delete it – saves you money and gives me control.
To me here is the message – it is possible to slow down on the new build of data centres by allowing service provider to use price to enable them to archive old stuff to a zero-energy platform.
Question : Can someone now dimension and scale this to see if it would produce any net benefit?
Future post - how much could a cloud services (facebook) charge to keep old data instantly available? Bet it's £3.99 or some other hoax price as a means to reduce cost!
Although we produce and author digital content, we do not seem to have complete ownership of it and this problem of lack of ownership occurs at several points when we want to, or someone else needs to, gain access or control over it, these being abuse, historic and death.
Abuse – when our information/ ID is stolen or taken out of context
History – it doesn’t become history, it remains current but we need it to fade and become less relevant (prevalent)
Death – gaining control to be able to switch off and archive.
A second post on the same topic is Logging out after snuffing out - which is much more about what happens to your digital data, domains and do you want appoint a digital executor to take care of online assets after death?
