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Adams, A. A. and Williams, S.A. What's Yours is Mine and What's Mine's My Own. (Unpublished)

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Abstract

Digital accounts are usually either personal or group accounts. Personal accounts are designed for use by one person and often have terms and conditions restricting their use to that person. Group accounts are not always available and where they exist often have no ability to distinguish between users. In the real world visitors to our homes and offices can peruse our bookshelf and borrow our books (usually with permission), our neighbours can pick up some shopping for us, or answer our phone on our behalf. Using a sequence of real-world derived anecdotes, we explore the consequences of this mismatch between how relationships work in the real world and the lack of support for these online, in terms of the security risks of using solo accounts for shared purposes, the loss of capability when sharing is impossible or carries too great a risk, and the problems caused by foreseeable major events (such as the death of an account holder) for which the infrastructure does not have appropriate procedures.

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