You would think a warning email would be worthwhile.

If someone was really name squatting they would write a script to log in once a week. So if you genuinely want to release unused names an email to the person informing them would be the least you could do.

As it is, it looks like someone at facebook just took the name for their own.

This would be a much more interesting story if it sounded like the authors wife used Instagram more than once a year. I can't help but not care without more context. If someone is sitting on a name on an account that rarely gets used and rarely gets tagged, what's the problem? Now if his wife was using Instagram every day and this happened... Well that would be an interesting story.

Dude.

If someone took my handle on instagram and thus I can no longer access any of my photos I would LOSE MY SHIT. It's totally unacceptable, especially for non techies who don't back up their stuff, to jut shut off access to your memories.

First of all, they didn't disable access - everything is there under a different handle. Secondly, you might lose your shit because you actually use Instagram. The author's wife doesn't use Instragram by the sounds of it - why does she get to sit on the name? She didn't buy it, it was never hers to begin with.

So you completely rely on a free web service to store something that important to you? It's unlikely now that they're owned by fb, but trusting a zero-revenue startup to offer you free access to some photos indefinitely probably isn't the safest assumption.

The old account isn't lost. It gets renamed.

Yeah, I think it begs the question: When did the last activity take place?

It's weird that they didn't just delete the account. Instead they renamed the account to "_____kathleen": https://twitter.com/kathleenw/status/448151516399276033

At least according to the quoted policy, it appears being tagged by others or logging in and viewing photos doesn't actually count as activity at all. Which is a really shit policy.

But the account wasn't revoked - merely renamed.

It makes more sense to rename the account. In the case of a user having old photos, likes, or comments, they don't lose all their history.

Another HN commenter had a similar experience: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7598567

Yes, but they didn't say they would do that, they said they would remove them - although the ToS probably doesn't give the offended customer any recourse, and the fact that the service is free means they have no leverage to challenge the ToS in court. The lesson here is that if you're not very busy and you have a name someone else wants, it can be taken away from you.

I wonder if the time period varies based on whether it is a requested user name. IE, they let you keep it until somebody else tries to sign up with that user name after at least 6 months of your inactivity.

I doubt people would pay money for it, but it'd be nice to have a service that periodically logs in you your accounts just to keep them "active". Or at a minimum, a reminder. I use my instagram account as read-only these days, but it would be a [minor] bummer to lose my account because I'm "inactive".