it's your legacy... Entrustet HIWI Blog

On Sunday, Jenna Wortham of the New York Times showed that Facebook is struggling to deal with user deaths.  We’ve been talking about this issue for over a year and half now, so we’re excited that it’s finally gone mainstream.  I believe Wortham’s great article, As Older Users Join Facebook, Network Grapples With Death, on Sunday was the tipping point where the issue of death and the internet became mainstream.

When we first started working on this problem, you couldn’t find anything on Google after searching for 30 minutes.  Now there’s thousands of articles and posts by everyone from reporters, tech bloggers, individuals, attorneys and even the American Bar Association.  I also attended our own Industry Conference called Digital Death Day in Mountain View, CA earlier this year.

It’s not just a Facebook Problem

Facebook has over 500m users worldwide and about 125m in the United States.  Using CDC and Facebook Ads demographic data, we’ve calculated that over 375,000 US Facebook users will die this year.  That’s more than 1 every 90 seconds.  The scale of the problem is huge.  Worldwide, assuming that Facebook’s users die at the same rate as Americans, 1.5m Facebook users will pass away this year, or about 3 every minute.

Think about that.  3 Facebook users die each minute.  And its not just Facebook.   Dave Winer of Scripting.com writes about how Amazon still sends him Father’s day reminders even though his father passed away last year.  Winer was also one of the early writers on Facebook death.  Broadjam, a site where bands can upload music, retains musicians’ songs after they pass away because they just don’t know when a user dies.  Sites like Flickr and Picasa will ultimately delete users digital family photos if users stop paying and nobody picks up the slack after someone passes away.  It’s a huge problem for almost every online service, but Facebook is on the leading edge because they are so big and people go there everyday with their real names and personal information.

How does Facebook Currently Deal with Death?

In Wortham’s article she talks about Courtney Purvin, who “got a shock when she visited Facebook last month. The site was suggesting that she get back in touch with an old family friend who played piano at her wedding four years ago.”  The problem was that “[t]he friend had died in April.

“It kind of freaked me out a bit,” [Purvin] said. “It was like he was coming back from the dead.”

Facebook currently allows friends and family to memorialize the profile of a deceased person, which takes the deceased out of searches, does not all any new friend requests and stops asking people to “reconnect” with them.  There is currently no way to permanently delete or hide a Facebook profile, although we’ve found that over 35% of people prefer that option over memorialization.

Currently, most people don’t know that they can memorialize Facebook profiles, so many profiles live on as “Facebook Ghosts” and continue to “haunt” their friends and families.  For a longer overview, check out our post Facebook Death Policies.

Facebook is searching for new ways to find out that users are dead.  Says spokeswoman Meredith Chin:

Facebook [is] considering using software that would scan for repeated postings of phrases like “Rest in peace” or “I miss you” on a person’s page and then dispatch a human to investigate that account.

“We are testing ways to implement software to address this,” she said. “But we can’t get it wrong. We have to do it correctly.”

The scanning approach could invite pranks — as the notification form already has. A friend of Simon Thulbourn, a software engineer living in Germany, found an obituary that mentioned someone with a similar name and submitted it to Facebook last October as evidence that Mr. Thulbourn was dead. He was soon locked out of his own page.

Chin is right.  Facebook needs to be very close to 100% in memorializing and deleting Facebook profiles or they will face a user backlash.  Can you imagine receiving an email or notification saying “we think you might be dead…please prove you aren’t.”  There are ways to get to a high confidence interval, but the final step needs to be verification with the government or approval of a valid death certificate.  It is the only way to be 100% sure that someone is dead.

Solutions

Services like Entrustet allow users to decide whether they’d like specific online accounts deleted or transferred to someone else when they pass away.  We also double verify that someone is indeed dead with an obituary and a valid death certificate.  Our corporate partners program offers prepackaged and custom solutions for companies of all sizes that notify partners when we’ve verified that one of their users has passed away.

We believe that it will take a neutral third party to independently verify user deaths across the Internet.  Our partners program will allow companies across the Internet to know when their users have passed away, along with what they wanted done with the account.  We believe that companies should adopt a solution, rather than sweeping the problem under the rug.  Facebook is a notable execption in that they’re trying to tackle the problem head on.

Internet companies can be good corporate citizens and be on the cutting edge of this growing problem by addressing it head on.  It’s not just the right thing to do, but it will improve customer service, save time and save money.

It’s going to be an exciting year for our industry.  We’d love to continue the conversation with anyone who’s interested.

What do you think?  What should Facebook do?  What do you want to happen to your Facebook profile when you pass away?

If you’re interested in being proactive about protecting your digital assets, you can sign up for Entrustet for free.  Sign up takes less than 60 seconds.

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digital death · digital death day · Digital Estate Planning · facebook death · facebook death policy · new york times