Posts Tagged
account
There comes a time when we all must shuffle off this mortal coil. The people you leave behind will have a great deal to cope with, including dealing with vast amounts of paper work. But what about your digital footprint? Unless you have revealed your Google password to people close to you, no one will ever be able to access all of the data you have stored online.
The launch of Google’s Inactive Account Manager changes all that. It’s a little morbid to think about, but it enables you to decide what happen to your Google data when you’re no longer around to access. We thought we’d take a look.
If you listen to your grandparents about the “good old days”, you’d think crime was a new phenomena. Back in the day, you could leave your house unlocked, kids could play outside without fear of strangers, and the banker would loan you money on your word and a handshake. Whenever anything bad did happen, a quick call to the sheriff (who already was your best friend) and the bad guy would be locked away, keeping your town a bastion of goodness yet again.
Sadly, that’s not the case today (and if we’d be honest, it wasn’t really that good ever). If you’re a thinking human, you likely keep your doors locked at night, set strong passwords on your devices, and make sure to not give out your ID numbers to shady businesses. You even probably try to use strong passwords, and not reuse the same ones across important accounts (at least we hope!).
Even with all of your preventions, though, you’re never 100% safe. That’s why we were wondering if you’ve ever had your accounts hacked. If you did, we’d love to hear how you got through it, and if you have any tips you can share with the rest of us. We’d love to hope that none of our readers have ever had that happen, but odds are, someone has, sadly.
And if you’d like more ways to keep your online data safe, checkout our post on Protecting Yourself From the Dangers of the Cloud.
Remember waiting to get a Gmail invite, or thinking carefully about what Twitter handle you wanted? These days, it seems like most of us manage too many different accounts to keep track of. I personally have nearly a dozen active email accounts, from my college and work emails to a personal Google Apps account and a standard Gmail account I mostly use for Google+. Depending on the day, I manage 3 or more Twitter accounts, 2 Facebook fan pages, and a half dozen various WordPress accounts on different sites.
I’m not the only one facing this problem. Even with one job and your personal life, you can easily have multiple accounts. Start doing work for a number of clients, and the accounts you manage can skyrocket quickly.
Some of these aren’t so hard to manage. For example, all of my WordPress accounts are on different domains, so they’re all unique accounts that can be logged in at once. Others, such as Gmail and Twitter accounts, can be much more tricky. Here’s some of the best ways to keep track all of your accounts without spending half of your day logging in and out of various services.
We recently looked at how to create your own intranet application using the 37signals products. The first step was to get yourself an OpenID. I touched on what OpenID is — a way to use the same credentials to log in to multiple services on the web.
As more services move to using this technology, there will be more people needing accounts. If you don’t yet have one, here is a list of resources where you can get your own.
