There are already various online services that automatically send emails on the behalf of the dearly departed. Yet My Webwill hopes to differentiate itself by asking customers for access to their respective social networking accounts. A Facebook user could have his account deactivated upon his death, for instance.

My Webwill is free, but for advanced features, you’ve got to pay to play. The details:

The basic service is free and includes the deactivation of 10 Internet accounts and the option to send up to five prepared e-mails written by the client. A premium service, costing 199 kronor ($29) a year, or 1,999 kronor for a lifetime subscription, offers more detailed management of social networking profiles as well as unlimited posthumous e-mails and account deactivations.

Personally however, unless I remain a bachelor, I consider My Webwill’s services unnecessary. Why not just share your passwords with a trusted or love one, with the agreement that they never open your personal accounts up until your deaths? The agreement should of course work both ways.

On top of that, wouldn’t the people managing sites like Facebook be willing to deactivate accounts, when politely asked and proof is provided? Feel free to share your thoughts below.

Find out more about the company at MyWebwill.com.

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The Electronic Frontier Foundation has even said the new model is to push Facebook users to share even more personal information with the general public. Much of the information you could previously control access to, such as your list of friends and the pages you are a fan of, is now considered “publicly available information” (PAI).

Even worse, there is now no way to limit the access of Facebook app makers to your PAI. Gone is the option to “not share any information about me through the Facebook API”.

The controversy has made more people aware that, at its core, Facebook is a business that’s all about helping people share their personal data with others, and hopes to earn money off this exposure-driven activity.

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Proof of the alleged misdemeanor was a screenshot of said poke

Technology and law traditionally haven’t meshed well together, as technology’s constant stream of new developments sometimes make the law’s adherence to the letter ludicrous. Stanford fellow Ryan Calo laid out the legal rationale behind the whole affair:

…it is still a form of communication restricted by a protective order.

“A poke is a very deliberate action,” he said. “You have to select the person and say, ‘this is what I want to do.’”

Advances in technology have expanded the spectrum of communication, from low-engagement to high-engagement ways of interacting with others, Calo said.

Fair enough, a woman goes to court and successfully gets a court order protecting her from further communication from an offending party, and that protection was violated. Getting arrested for poking someone else on Facebook sounds a bit rough, but there’s a lesson here: If someone hated or feared me enough to actually file a restraining order against me, I would simply delete him or her from my list of Facebook friends. Common sense people!

Source

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Courtesy of MakeUseOf

• Send a message via Facebook to your target, hopefully provoking them into answering. According to Facebook help, answering reply grants the recepient temporary access to your profile. A brief time which will no doubt be maximized.
• Failing that, you can trick your target’s friends into adding you. Once you’re able to acquire a large number of mutual friends, leaving an impression of familiarity—which increases the chances of succesfully befriend your target on Facebook—becomes that much easier.

Full details here.

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[censored],

Y’all be careful about what you publish on Facebook during business hours.? [censored] and [censored] are always watching, and I know of one person that has been fired for improper internet use.

Love ya.

[censored] ARM, CAM
[censored]
First Management Services

Oh wow, I originally considered not censoring the names in the email (and the position of the addressee in the salutation. But I’m not someone who relishes sabotaging someone the career of someone else—even if they be a stranger.

But I do wonder: what kind of Facebook activity would lead to someone losing their job? Be careful of what you share online folks!

Post from: The Gadget Blog

Lawyers Meyer Vandenberg, acting for lending company MKM Capital, applied to Master David Harper of the Supreme Court last week to use the popular internet site to serve notice of a judgment on two borrowers who had defaulted on a loan.
Carmel Rita Corbo and Gordon Kingsley Maxwell Poyser failed to keep up the repayments on $150,000 they borrowed from MKM last year to refinance the mortgage on their Kambah townhouse.

This development isn’t as revolutionary as it sounds; the Supreme Court judge only granted approval after the lender’s lawyers showed that conventional methods of serving notices had failed; paying for a newspaper ad and private investigators, as well as looking for the lendees at their respective homes produced no results.
In other words, I’m pretty sure that the judge felt that there was no other choice. normal circumstances probably wouldn’t have seen approval for serving notices on Facebook. Observers might express surprise that the Australian legal system is willing to trust that two accounts on Facebook do represent the real Ms. Corbo and Mr. Poyser. But again, the reliance on a social networking website is based on sound reasoning by the lender’s legal team:

“The Facebook profiles showed the defendants’ dates of birth, email addresses and friend lists and the co-defendants were friends with one another,” a spokesman for the firm said.
This information was enough to satisfy the court that Facebook was a sufficient method of communicating with the defendants.

By striving for a perfect balance between conventional legal procedure and the need to adapt to the situation, the Australian judge has proven his wisdom. It would be a waste, after all, to discount the so-called new things, especially when the old way of doing things has proven unsuccessful. The legal team that successfully gained approval for the Facebook court notice also deserve credit, as its approach to solving its clients problem was very creative and flexible.

(image from federalcourtclerks.com)

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