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.

The Global Village is alive – on Twitter and YouTube

I’m watching the incredible and tragic images from Japan on the earthquake and the tsunami that followed. The human devastation, accompanied by physical destruction, infrastructure and economic damage, and the potential environmental impact of a nuclear plant meltdown all combine to make this one of the worst disasters of our time. I know the whole world will respond with emergency relief, but it will be many years before this one is over.

I’m also struck with how much this story has exploded on social media sites, most obviously Twitter and YouTube. In the hours after the disaster, there were 1200 tweets per minute about the disaster (not all of these were from the scene: the whole world was talking). YouTube now has many thousands of videos from Japan, some taken during the quake, many others showing the aftermath.

We just saw how the web played a pivotal role in the unrest in the Middle East. Thousands, perhaps millions of protesters, used Twitter and Facebook to communicate, band together and plan their next steps – first in Tunisia, then Egypt and now Libya. This is still going on. Over two hundred years ago, printing presses in the American colonies fueled a revolution that defied a powerful oppressor. Today, smartphones and web sites are doing exactly the same thing.

These sites are a clearing house for anyone with news to spread or a picture or video to share. They act as always-on sources of information with an immediacy that the news media – no matter how tech-savvy they are or will become – can never match. They are open and accessible by all; there are no filters or gatekeepers here. As we know, this is not a good thing when thoughtful, careful, accurate reporting is required; they won’t compete with traditional news sources when it comes to reasoned consideration of a complex story. But for cases like this, where immediate on-the-scene news is needed, nothing can beat the tools of Web 2.0.

The founding of YouTube in 2005 and Twitter in 2006 are well known stories and can be easily sourced on the web. Suffice it to say that the founders of both did not envision that their creations would be, within just a few years, major forces on the world stage bringing people together for common cause, toppling governments, sharing news and experience worldwide.

These sites also provide something that no news media has ever done – allow anyone, anywhere in the world, to share the emotions of the experience. The revolutionary fervor and hope of those in the Middle East has been astonishing to see. The outpourings of grief and concern for the Japanese people this week has been equally impressive. The highest trending hashtag on Twitter right now: #prayforjapan.

You have to be amazed at the new roles found for tools that seemed to start with a very different purpose. What began as fluffy, inconsequential, almost trivial web sites, has been put to new uses by popular demand. We remember that Twitter started with the question “What are you doing right now?” And who can forget all those skateboard-riding gerbils on YouTube?

I still encounter many who scoff at Twitter and other sites like it: trivial time-sinks with no serious purpose. Perhaps after 2011 these skeptics will have a different viewpoint. We should all find a new respect for the power of these sites that enable mass communication, mass sharing and an almost subversive way for people to communicate without barriers or gatekeepers, official or otherwise.

There has long been talk about the Internet turning us into a global village: it’s times like these that I can believe it.

Geotagging: next big thing, or next big thing to worry about?

Is Geotagging the next big privacy issue?

It works like this: with more and more of our computing devices (e.g. smartphones) containing built-in GPS capabilities, the technology exists for newly created data – like a document or a photo – to also contain the coordinates, in the form of latitude and longitude, of the place where it was created. The coordinates are stored as metadata within the file and can also be accessed by other applications.

This feature has some nice uses with photography, both still and video. Just about all smartphone cameras seem to have this feature built in, and at first glance it seems to be an extension of the ability to record the date and time the photos were taken. The continued convergence of GPS with other apps seems inevitable, something along the lines of the principle “If someone can do it, someone will do it.”

But there’s a potential downside too. Photos uploaded to social media sites have the potential for advertising all our valuable stuff, and then announcing where we are – or aren’t. And increasingly, users seem unaware that the feature exists or is turned on. An interesting article in the NY Times tells the story of Mythbuster guy Adam Savage who unknowingly Tweeted a photo of his Land Rover in his driveway that also included the coordinates of his house (he’s since moved).

The theory is that exposing your location puts you at risk from stalkers (they know where you are) and burglars (they know where you aren’t) alike. To my knowledge, no one has been able to point to either of these things happening – yet. Still, it doesn’t hurt to be cautious, especially if you’re posting pictures of your kids (or your kids are posting pictures of themselves).

A supposed White Hat Hacker with the handle ‘Creepy Stalker Guy’ has set up a Twitter account called ICanStalkU which is broadcasting a continuous feed of the posts, tweets and photos out there that also advertise exactly where the poster is. I take it he’s trying to make a point, though I’m not 100% sure what it is.

So should we worry? Certainly there’s a risk here, but I think we should beware of over reacting. The technology has its uses and it’s not going away. The key I think is to (1) make sure everyone knows about and understands it, and (2) make changing the default setting, i.e. turning it OFF, easy to find and manage.

Also, I applaud Twitter’s implementation, where you can set your “Geotag Precision” to Exact, Neighborhood or City. I think all implementations of geotagging should be done this way.

There will always be new technologies that some of us will loathe and others embrace (think RFID). Unless it’s something that harms society itself, we should accommodate everyone on the spectrum. The key is ease of customization coupled with fully informed consent.