* * * * *
                                        
                            Memorialized in silicon
                                        
My Dad died last week so Bunny and I have been rushing around making
arrangements and going thorugh his papers. I've been going through his
computer, an Acer Chromebook I got him nearly two years ago to replace his
dead laptop, I was surprised at the number of accounts he has:

* Google email account
* a LinkedIn account,
* match.com (!),
* Twitter,
* Vimeo and most surprising,
* Facebook!

And it's not surprising to me that his Facebook account is under an assume
name, but the name, “Les Hansel,” has no meaning to me. Why that name?

What's scary about the Facebook account is that he has no “friends,” no
profile, nothing much at all except a bunch of “friend recomendations” that
are scarily accurate. Looking over the list, I see his sisters, their
husbands, a few nieces and nephews and finally myself (and annoyingly low in
the list—come on Facebook! Why am I not higher in the list?), plus a whole
list of people that show up on his physical Rolodex file of contacts.

Thinking this over, I can only conclude he might have allowed Facebook access
to his contact list, or more likely, the majority of his “friend
recommendations” allowed Facebook access to their contact lists, and Dad's
AOL (America Online) email address was among the lists. The rest is filled in
by Facebook's “a friend of a friend must also be a friend” type associations.

His Twitter account has his real name (oh really?) but it seems the only
person he's following there is … Kathy Griffin [1]? Seriously? Is he trying
to confuse his enemies? Becuase he's confusing me.

It also appears he didn't use his LinkedIn account all that much, given how
many pop-ups I'm getting urging me to update this, and checkout that and
whatnot.

I am not going to checkout his match.com account. Not going to do it.

And I'm having trouble getting into his Google email account (he has like
three different passwords listed for Google and the account recovery
mechanism tends to fail) but given the activity on this other web accounts, I
doubt he used it much.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathy_Griffin

Email author at sean@conman.org

.