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
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.