What never forgets? A computer, that’s what.

I was playing around with the Miranda instant messaging client (free download from sourceforge.net). It’s an interesting little utility because it works with several IM services (Yahoo!, AOL, MSN, ICQ, IRC, and Jabber). I haven’t really been into instant messaging for years, though I do use one occasionally. But a multi-protocol client seemed worth checking out, so I did.

My first impression was that it’s definitely plain. Absolutely no eye-candy. Since the version is still less than 1.0, I’m figuring that’s probably to be expected. But in any event, it’s always what’s under the hood that counts the most. First off, Miranda is everything it purports to be. It hooks into all of those services simultaneously, so it’s a kind of one-stop chat device. At least moderately cool, IMO.

As I said earlier, I haven’t really used IMs for years. But over the years, I’ve IM’d on almost all of those services. I was surprised to find that my Yahoo account was still active, even though I haven’t used it in years. And my AOL screen name was still active and working, even though I stopped using AOL more than eight years ago.

That’s a scary thought when you really stop to ponder it (which I did). How many services that you no longer use are still out there just waiting for you to log in again? How much of your personal information is still sitting on someone’s server just waiting for your friendly neighborhood hacker and you’d never know about it because you don’t use that service any more?

I don’t believe there is any legal requirement to do so, but shouldn’t a standard industry practice be to purge client information after a certain period of inactivity? I have no idea what a reasonable period might be, but it’s a sobering thought to know that an account that has been inactive for more than eight years was just sitting there waiting. I was fortunate that there was no major personal information associated with it because I had been very sparing in the information I provided (just an email address and my state and the email address died when I left AOL). But still, what if I HAD provided all of the information that AOL wanted? Scary.

This entry was posted on Monday, 15 January 2007 at 00:17 and is filed under Applications, Computers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.