Will your memberships in FaceBook, Twitter, etc. continue in perpetuity upon your demise? Are there any current web sites that, for a price, will end your memberships after you die?
Wired magazine had an article on this very topic. Within the article are links to companies like Legacy Locker or Deathswitch.com
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/02/pl_scottbrown_digitalself
Good Luck!
Time magazine ran a similar article, mentioning those same companies.
With Facebook what happens is they lock your account - preventing any future log-ins - and turn it into a memorial page, allowing people to leave comments. I’ve seen it with a few people. Obviously I’m assuming someone has to get in touch with Facebook to let them know though. MySpace apparently uses a similar set-up.
I should hope not.
Contact the support staff for those services and ask their specific policy. I would expect that, at least for the reputable ones, they will shut down an account at the request of the next of kin on receipt of some kind of verifiable documentation like a death certificate.
If we assume Facebook survives a couple hundred years, then most accounts will be dead people.
I’m not sure I’d want to hang out in a mausoleum.
(Not that I’d want to hang out on Facebook now.)
Some quick googling turned up these:
WordPress.com doesn’t have a specific form for it but you can contact them here
If a city survives a couple hundred years, most of the residents may be dead people, but that doesn’t have much of an affect on your life, right?
The zombie apocalypse is much easier to survive when it consists of, say, five zombies.
Yea, but we generally give away dead peoples stuff and put them underground in cemetaries. Dead facebook users presumably take up more or less as much “space” as living ones, they’ll still take up the username, still come up in searches, you’ll still get notifications that you haven’t contacted them in a while or that its their birthdays.
I suspect if Facebook or similar services really do last for decades or more, they’ll start deleting accounts that go a few years without anyone accessing them. To free up usernames if nothing else.
But Facebook “memorializes” dead user’s accounts upon request, so they already have a way of keeping them separate. I’m not sure why the username thing is an issue. Most people don’t even have a username on Facebook, do they?
I am not sure I understand the complete implications of this question. There are a number of deceased users even on this board and their past content is still searchable. Most of the popular web is being archived. That started in the 1990’s and will likely grow so that most internet entries including this post will still be available in some form 100 years from now. Look at this blast from the past from the Wayback Project to get a glimpse of what has already been archived including people’s personal home pages. Google archives it as well.
I don’t see a much of an issue with social networking sites being filled with deceased people even if their accounts stayed active forever. That is easy to filter out based on criteria like last login date even if there isn’t an official death declaration.
I think it is great overall and would not want such things to disappear. I would love to read my ancestor’s Facebook updates from Jamestown and the Civil War for example and I hope the equivalent is easily available to people in the future.
The families of deceased users often ask for their accounts and online content to be removed entirely. Seems odd to me, but that’s what they want.
Your right. I was thinking Facebook needed unique user names as well as email addresses, but thats not true.
Even if they request that it be taken off the main site, that doesn’t mean that it is truly gone or cannot be accessed from an archive site. It is public information in the U.S. once it is posted. I just looked at the online archives of my personal website which I took down recently. Everything is still there going back from the start in multiple snapshots spanning 6 years. There are photos that I thought were gone for good that I destroyed myself after the death of a child. I thought they were gone forever but they are still there and I can save them back and have them reprinted if I want or anyone else can for that matter. I think that is a good thing now that some time has passed. Once something is on the web, you don’t really control where it goes or how it get stored from that point even if some companies want to pretend like you do and make some money off of that misconception.
My daughter has my passwords to my Facebook and email accounts. When I die, they’re toast. Yes, I understand the old stuff is out there, but I have no intention of being memorialized on Facebook. I know people who are, but that’s not for me.
The sites have every reason not to remove dead members as it makes them look more popular than they are.
As for the Wayback Machine, I love it, but it’s way too full of holes, with far too many sites, opting out of being indexed, so you really don’t get much quality in the last five years. Still it’s a good for pre 2000 stuff.
LiveJournal and Dreamwidth will turn your journal into a memorial journal, which will allow people to continue to comment on any entry that they have access to. (e.g. if things are friends-locked, they’re still under lock.) People are still commenting on my friend Virginia’s last entry (which was a goodbye, she knew she was terminally ill) to say how much they miss her, or things that happened that reminded them of her, and the like. And people who don’t even realize that she’s dead continue to leave comments on stories that she wrote, sometimes asking for sequels, which is just sad.
Can you substantiate this, or is it just a guess?
I’ve had some involvement in this in the past. The number of deceased users on any service is tiny compared with the live ones, and I’ve never seen anything suggesting such a policy exists on the major web sites.
Keeping inactive members? Sure. But not dead ones.
Well, one friend of mine died a year and a half ago and until recently would show up in the Facebook sidebar saying ‘you haven’t spoken to this friend recently…’ Yes. He’s dead.
A few times new members have responded to his comments on (heh) zombie threads. This can be good or bad, but it tends towards the bad. It definitely derails the thread.
I can see it now… your [insert other relative] really wants your memorial page and your daughter wants to follow your wishes. Other relative insists you were of diminished capacity when you told her to delete it, leading to a drawn-out five-year legal battle over whether to pull life support on your Facebook page. 