Your social network pages need end of life planning too

A recent conversation with friends revolved around the question “what happens to all your social network stuff when you die?” I know the topic sounds grim (although I assure you the conversation wasn’t), but it’s an interesting issue and one that everyone should give some thought to. After all, as Steve Jobs said, death is a destination we all share.

I had looked into this question a few years ago and found that it truly presented problems for relatives when loved ones passed away. Often there was much material online that family members either might not know about, or lacked the means to remove or otherwise archive or care for. Social media sites, in the early days, had no good ways of dealing with it either.

This led to pages of the deceased lingering in a kind of online limbo. I recall an article in the NY Times called “As Facebook Users Die,Ghosts Reach Out” from 2010 that stated “Facebook says it has been grappling with how to handle ghosts in the machine but acknowledges that it has not found a good solution.” That was then.

Having rechecked this issue now, I can assure you that things have gotten a whole lot better. All the sites I checked – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest – had policies in place and much has been written on the subject. Wikipedia even has an article “Death and the Internet” about it. The problem I saw years ago has been solved, and if not perfectly, at least adequately.

There are two ways to address the online presence of a loved one who has passed. Delete his accounts altogether or convert them to a memorial status for a period of time so that friends and relatives can share their grief and celebrate his life. Facebook allows either option, and has a form that must be filled in to report a death; you’ll have to search for it in the help section but it’s there. I think the memorial page is a good idea and I predict it will become the option of choice. As we all use sites like FB to play out a part of our public lives, it makes sense for others to use it to gather and share. These pages should not grow stale from neglect, and neither should they be deleted without ceremony.

Other sites deactivate accounts upon request (Twitter) or after a long period of inactivity (Dropbox). There are also ways to download a copy of the content for you to save, rather than having it ultimately disappear. I found this graphic on lifehacker to be helpful in summarizing the policies of the major sites.

All sites require that the person requesting the change prove in some way that the person has passed on. This is not something that anyone can do as a prank, and every site takes action only when assured the request is legit. Many require a copy of a death certificate, or a link to an obituary online. People, not software, handle these requests on a case by case basis. It’s an extensive responsbility too, since one stat I found stated that over 10,000 Facebook users die every day. (Wow, BTW.)

We should all plan for this eventuality ourselves, just as we prepare wills, end-of-life directives and the rest. As a start, I recommend making a list of ALL your online accounts, with usernames and passwords and leaving it for your executor or spouse. (You can seal it in an envelope if you like.) Although it’s technically wrong for someone else to log in as you, even after death, it’s a head start in getting one’s arms around what will undoubtedly be an unhappy and complicated chore. Untangling all those accounts, including banking and much more, is a daunting task. Don’t make it harder on your loved ones than it has to be.