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:
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.