The really sick twist is that I think if you don't have an account at all, you're even more vulnerable to someone making a fake one for you.

If you have a real account and pay for verification, and someone else has a fake one, it's easy to see that one is "verified" and one isn't.

If you don't have an account and the only ones on the site are fake ones claiming to you... seems you're screwed?

In the extra-crazy future you will be able to pay to not have an account but still have them take down fakes, maybe?

It’s not just social media either. I remember reading something a few years ago recommending that you create an IRS online account to prevent someone else from fraudulently creating one on your behalf to steal tax returns. :/

Can't you just threaten to sue if they don't delete it? In the EU one could probably use the GDPR to lawfully take down a fake account. In France there's a right to one's image law that can also be used.

Defensive account squatting. It's a thing.

Was talking to a lawyer recently (making a will; I'm old), and he saw my email address was [email protected] (my lastname is almost globally unique), and he asked if I had bought up "the rest" i.e. lastname.com, .org, .com.au, .org.au, .net.au, .id. I told him my paranoia had met it's match in my laziness, and he looked at me like I was an idiot about to have his identity stolen.

The difference is that there can only be one owner of JohnSmith.com in the ICANN WHOIS database but there can be millions of John Smith on META platforms.

But if there’s a [email protected], there can also be a [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], etc

But most people would not be typing [email protected] or any of the variants you mentioned into their browser address. My point still stands that domain names have a completely different set of constraints.

Yes, I accept that. I'm personally lucky that all the people alive with my surname in the world are related at the great-grandparent level. There's less than a handful with my firstname.

I briefly looked into trademarking my personal name (legal to do in Australia) but its cost prohibitive (vs verifying for multiple online platforms).

I even thought briefly about legally changing my name to include a new middle-name that was my PGP short key id. But Australia does not permit the use of numeric symbols in names. (Though I guess you could shift the hex string by 10 so 0-F maps to A-P. That wouldn't break the rules.)

Interesting idea RE PGP key as middle name... just it would suck to then later on lose access to your private key!

He can change his middle name again. It's not like the government will require him to produce the private key to do so

Or generate a vanity key id?

Those are all interesting things you could do, but in what way would they help when we’re talking about the Meta platform? We’re considering the case where someone is actively choosing to use a name that’s not their own for some reason, and if that reason required impersonation they’d just make an account using your publicly available PGP middle name as well.

millions of John Smith all paying $11.99/month

I think I like that lawyer.

This is a discussion from 2005.

By now it’s become pretty clear that it’s not possible to preemptively defend against this. There are a bazillion gTLDs and on large social media sites display names are not unique.

PSA: Having a will is not just if you are old. Every one should have one and if your affairs are straight forward you may be able to it yourself with a kit.

Can you elaborate? Why should everyone have a will? In particular, why should a kidless and unmarried person have a will?

Makes things easier for when you're gone. You'll probably have some next of kin, even if you're on bad terms with them.

If you die without a will, the state ends up determining what happens with your possessions. That usually means that they'll go down a list of relatives and ask them "hey, this person died, do you want to inherit their belongings". If they find absolutely nobody (this happens a lot with people that die with a lot of debt, since you also inherit the debt), the will instead falls to the state.

The order makes some sense (first is spouse, then kids, then siblings, then direct family and finally extended family), but it's of course something left up to the present state of the law and depending on how that might change, something could occur you're not happy with.

One specific example of this (albeit not for your case) is in the event you're gay; gay people often had to prepare their will specifically because the state wouldn't acknowledge them as the spouse (this was even with the "civil arrangements"), so the state would just skip over their spouse for inheritance and relinquish stuff to their family instead.

This doesn't apply of course if you're not married, but it's one simple example in how that default order might have some asterisks that are easily avoidable if you just have a will.

Basically it's useful to have one to avoid a lot of complications in the event of an untimely death (which can happen for all sorts of reasons).

> Makes things easier for when you're gone. ... even if you're on bad terms with them.

Thanks for your detailed answer. You haven't convinced me it is important either way, but I at least know now that I havent missed something important.

It seems like you've only made the case for people who don't like the standard list of inheritors or for gay people, not everyone like you mentioned before.

I'm not the parent replier.

Regardless, if you like the standard list of inheritors, it's still worth writing it down. That means that the executor of your will knows that that is the order you prefer. Laws can be changed at any point and it could say, be changed in order to prioritize your parents over your siblings; if you don't care at all about what happens with your belongings after your death, yeah fair, there's nothing I could do to convince you, but for anyone else that's worth taking into account. Having it explicitly spelled out in your will ensures that that doesn't change, even if the law does.

Gay people was just an example of what might seem sensible on paper could still have a strange asterisk attached to it.

FYI you do not always inherit debt. It gets paid from your estate, IF they file for it. Source: lost my wife to cancer at 41. She was 41. I was 32.

I paid zero of that debt when she died. Just ignored it. It was all in her name. I might have also been fully ptsd’d.

But my credit is fine, the probate period is LONG (10+ years) gone, etc…

Sure my evidence is anecdotal but no - debt is not “transferred” to your name like you inherit it.

You do not necessarily have to inherit the debt, even if you don't know about it beforehand. Where I live that is called 'accepting an inheritance beneficially', it may have a different legal term where you live. The essence is that you only accept the inheritance if, and only if it brings you a net benefit and otherwise you reject it. Usually this costs a few units of your local currency to arrange.

Note that all this stuff can get very complex in a hurry especially when taxes are involved (and they usually are) so you should definitely hire the help of a professional when dealing with this for anything exceeding a few thousand.

I presume it makes things simpler for your next of kin, whoever that may be (i.e. not a child/spouse, but a parent, sibling etc.)

If you went to the trouble to accumulate resources in life you might find it interesting to give some of it to your friends. If anything, I could see the argument that someone doesn't really need a will if one has kids or a spouse as they would get everything by default anyway, and the will us just a way of carving it apart, whether for tax reasons or to prevent infighting... but if you don't have family then without a will your belongings are essentially forfeit :(. I definitely have people in my life whom I want to receive my assets when I die (though I also haven't taken the time to make a will, despite it coming up weirdly often... I think the universe might be hinting at me).

Because otherwise you may find that your estate goes to the state, when in fact you want it to go somewhere else. Subject to the inheritance rules in your legal arena, which can vary considerably.

Kidless and unmarried is actually a great reason.

If you're married then pretty much everything goes to the spouse by default. Kids, likewise, are usually a default inheritor as well. Can get messy if you have a bunch of kids, but the default is usually an even split.

But what happens if you don't have a spouse or kids? Do you want that cash to go to a charity? To your shitty relative who you don't like? You gotta make it explicit.

That is a pretty good argument for having a will, indeed.

For me personally, I am not attached to the concept of cash/assets enough to really care what happens with excess assets after I am gone. It is something entirely different if you have offspring, and want to pass accumulated assets to them, I get that. However, given how much money was printed recently, all the cash I leave behind might as well be burnt, I really dont care either way. If I have friends in need, I might as well pass some of it on to them before I go.

> he looked at me like I was an idiot about to have his identity stolen

I won't call you an idiot, but I will say you're significantly increasing the risk of social engineering. I had a vanity domain email and someone use another TLD and tried to switch my bank accounts using it. The bank customer service agents are very willing to believe in the equality and authenticity @lastname.com and @lastname.net. If you go to a HN post on vanity email, there are countless stories about customer service agents not understanding how email addresses work.

Thanks for that. You‘ve convinced me.

I still use the vanity email, but you just have to think about the phish-ability of it. I typically use [email protected] or similar for logins, instead of first@domain, or first.last@domain. It is not guessable if someone knows my name, while being easy enough for me to remember and read out on the phone or say to a person.

I do own (or have a family member buy) most of the common lastname.tld's that exist. I'm just hoping that the confusion of uncommon tld's are a good defense. Eg. I hope CS agent won't easily believe [email protected] should be [email protected] or .wiki

I do like your idea of trying to trademark the name (and I considered it too) but my name is common enough (and a word in a European language) that others have tried already, and its already in use with a handful of businesses across the world.

Ok, Mr. Infinite Money lawyer.

Yes, that is very true. But it is a risk I'll have to take. But a good reminder to check if there are still 'dangling pointers' to old social media accounts.

Screwed in what way though? Someone posting as you? When it matters (job app?) just use the fact that the acct is not verified to show its not you.

Social media should be considered one giant deepfake.

I don’t think any of this really matters. You can just not have a Facebook account, almost none of us are in positions to defend our social status or prevent social engineering on Facebook. If you’re famous, that’s one thing, but there’s no point if you’re an average person.

First wait until Burger King brings back Whopper Sacrifice. Eat for free while leaving social media.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whopper_Sacrifice

Group chat on WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal still counts as social media no?

Yes, so? Where do you see me using any of those?

There are three I just cannot get rid off it seems: WhatsApp, Youtube (incl. Youtube Music) and HN. And Youtube is becoming such a pain lately, with all those crap channel recommendations and whatnot, that I am sometimes considering subscribing outside of Youtube, e.g. Patreon or so, to the one or two channels I regularly whatch. Which would leave Youtube Music and Whatsapp, both of which are just too convinient for the time being...

You can block channel recommendations by removing the html bits that contains them.

There is also the 'unhook' extension:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/unhook-remove-yout...

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-recom...

I don’t think so. They are social but they are not media.

By that definition, email would then fall into the "social media" category, along with letters, postcards, telegrams, telephone calls, dinner parties etc.