Earlier this week, Mark Zuckerburg posted a note on Facebook announcing that users would be able to download their profile data to their hard drives whenever they wanted. After jumping through some security hoops, you can request a zip file of all of your profile data. We still don’t know what kind of format the data will be in, but it allows you to download all of your Facebook photos, updates, friends and the rest of your profile data.
It’s a big step for two reasons. First, it shows that Facebook is taking privacy and data portability concerns much more seriously than they previously had. Second, it paves the way for Facebook users to use their Facebook data other places than on Facebook’s fairly closed network. Evan Caroll at the Digital Beyond has a great post that goes into more detail if you’d like an in depth overview the history behind Facebook data portability.
At Entrustet, we’re excited that Facebook is allowing personal data downloads because it is another sign that the data you create online is worthwhile and personally important. We think it is one of the first steps toward allowing people to control their online data on social networks. While it is still a ways off, Facebook profile data downloads could become parts of online memorials like 1000 memories, Legacy.com and others that are adding a new online dimension to the grieving process.
In a recent Mashable article called 7 resources for handling digital life after death, a commenter named Coreytess told a story about a young boy who passed away. His family used his digital presence to create a comforting memorial at the funeral:
A young boy i know died in the tornado that destroyed his school… they used his MySpace “About Me” as his prologue for the memorial. It was so amazing and touching…
So much of what we create is now online. Our legacies are digital and people can remember us for what we’ve done online. This is both good and bad. Your digital assets like you Myspace, Facebook or blog can be used for good, just like in the story from the Mashable comments, but your digital assets can also be used for bad. Maybe you want people to remember you for who you were while you were alive, not for what was in your Facebook account. Or maybe you’re like me and you’d like people to remember you online for your blog and not for your Facebook or Twitter.
Facebook should implement settings that allows users to decide which parts, if any, of their profiles should be deleted when they die. Facebook should also add the ability to transfer accounts and data to an heir. Now that you can download your own data while you are alive, shouldn’t you be able to nominate someone to download specific parts of your Facebook profile, like your digital photos, when you pass away?
There’s a few reasons why Facebook doesn’t do this yet. First, they have no idea when their users die. Second, they have no method to make sure that users are in fact dead. (Our corporate partner program does this for companies, look for an announcement tomorrow). There have been multiple instances where people have faked their friends deaths to free their Facebook profile. Third, Facebook currently only allows you to memorialize your profile. If you’d like your account deleted when you die, you’d need to give your survivors access so they can manually delete your account. I’ve given my brother access to my Facebook via my Entrustet account so that when I pass away (hopefully not for 80+ years) my Facebook will be deleted.
If you’d like to enable your heirs to either delete your profile when you pass away, or download important data that you’d like preserved, you need to transfer your account to an heir and put a plan in place before you pass away. You can get started for free on Entrustet.
- Tags:
- digital death · Facebook · facebook death · facebook death policy · social networks and death · the digital beyond
It’s a sensitive, but important question that you should think about before you pass away. As Sunday’s front page New York Times article called As Older Users Join Facebook, The Networks Grapples With Death shows, Facebook itself knows about the problem, but has not implemented a full solution to solve it yet.
Some quick stats for you:
Facebook has over 500m users.
Over 375,000 US Facebook users will pass away this year. For some perspective, that means that more than 1 Facebook users dies every 90 seconds.
About 1.5m Facebook users worldwide will pass away this year, assuming the rest of the world has similar death rates to the United States. We think this is a fairly good assumption, which means that 3 Facebook users die every minute!
Facebook allows your survivors to memorialize your profile after you pass away, but it doesn’t seem that many people actually go through with memorializing profiles of their friends and family. Instead, many Facebook profiles turn into “Facebook Ghosts” that continue to haunt their Facebook friends. We’ve even seen cases where survivors write hurtful messages on the walls of deceased people. Nobody can go in and clean up these messages, so they are left up for the whole world to see. That’s why it’s important to make your last wishes known ahead of time using a service like Entrustet.
We haven’t seen much discussion of what people want done with their Facebook profile after they die, so we put it out to Twitter, Facebook and everyone in the Entrustet office.
Question: What do you want to happen to your Facebook profile when you pass away?
There’s four possible answers: Memorialize it, Transfer to a Friend, Permanently Delete or I don’t care, I’m dead. Here’s what they had to say:
Nathan Lustig, Cofounder – I want my Facebook deleted after I die. I know that some people might be comforted by my memorialized profile, but I don’t want anyone to ever have access to my account and I’m confident that there will be other websites out there where people can come together to remember me. I’d much rather have people remember me by my blog.
Jesse Davis, Cofounder – I want my Facebook account deleted. I don’t particularly want my family and friends to remember me by my facebook profile. I’d prefer they remember me primarily via their memories.
Kathleen Selden, Lawyer Sales – I think I would like my Facebook to be memorialized in the case of my death. I know that if one of my friends passed away, I would love to still have the option of looking back on our time together and remembering them through our photos and conversations on Facebook, and I would like my friends to be able to utilize this option as well if they want to. This is especially true now that I am about to graduate and it is likely that my friends and I will be scattered across the country and will not necessarily be able to make it to a formal memorial service. It would be nice to have another outlet to share memories and remember people by.
Christine Ebinger, Lawyer Sales – I would like to have my Facebook account deleted when I die. I think there are better ways to be remembered than by my Facebook wall, such as a memorial service, etc. I think it would be a little weird if I still had an active account if I weren’t around to add to it.
Rob Howard, Social Media/Business Development – I think I want my Facebook memorialized after I die, at least at this point in my life. I don’t have any significant blogs or other social media accounts, and it seems like a cool way for friends and family to come together to reminisce and share posts.
Liz Prinz, Social Media – Facebook is the digital asset I use most often. If I pass away, I would like to have it memorialized for a limited amount of time, maybe two weeks, and then have it deleted. I always thought it was kind of nice when people were able to post on a deceased person’s wall some closing remarks. People can also have a little bit of time to look at photos of the deceased, which might be good closure as well. But in the end I would definitely want it deleted, there’s no point in keeping it up forever.
Nora Liu, Business Development – I want my Xiaonei account (Chinese Facebook) to transfer to my children when I pass away. No one else can have access to the account when he or she is alive, so I want my children to share what I have after I pass away. Since facebook is another version of Xiaonei, I also want it to transfer to my children for the same reasons.
Joseph Brennan, Finance – I think I want my facebook memorialized after I die, at least at this point in my life. I don’t have any significant blogs or other social media accounts, and it seems like a cool way for friends and family to come together to reminisce and share posts.
Danya Mi, Business Development – I don’t care about what will happen to my Facebook after I die. I think memorialized profile would be sweet but I won’t be able to see it anyway since I’m dead…If anyone of my family wants to access to my account, I am totally fine. I am also thinking that it can be great if someone can help me post maybe some secret notes I wrote before I die. The notes can tell all my friends the secrets I want to let people know about only after I die. Maybe I will write a note to list the names of people I like/dislike in my life.
Corey Capasso, Founder Add the Flavor – I want my Facebook profile to turn into a virtual tombstone so that people can comment on my wall and have something to remember me by.
Bryan Camp – Psychology Grad Student, Arizona State University – I would like the option to be given to my wife and family to either delete it or a memorial type page up for a few years.
Forrest Woolworth – PerBlue – I want my facebook profile memorialized in some sort of way, but I want my wife to be able to moderate the profile for me.
- Tags:
- delete facebook profile · facebook death · facebook death policy · memorialize facebook profile
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.
- Tags:
- digital death · digital death day · Digital Estate Planning · facebook death · facebook death policy · new york times
Over 375,000 US Facebook users will pass away this year and over 1.5m will pass away worldwide, a number that’s risen by almost 100k since March when we calculated our first estimate at South By Southwest. It’s a huge problem for Facebook and for the friends and relatives of people who pass away.
The rest of the world is starting to take notice. Yesterday, the New York Times ran an article on the front page titled As Older Users Die, Facebook Ghosts Reach Out, which has received over 140 comments in the last 24 hours. For the first time, Facebook acknowledged that it has a problem with “ghost profiles” and is trying to find a solution that balances the need to respect users wishes with the scalability necessary to service Facebook’s 500m and growing user base.
If you don’t want your profile to turn into a ghost that “will haunt your friends and family”, make sure you’ve set up an Entrustet account with your last wishes so that your family will know what to do. It’s free, so sign up today!
- Tags:
- dead facebook users · facebook death policy · ghost profiles · memorialize facebook profile · zombie profile
