Our new Digital Property Search allows family members to find digital property of recently deceased loved ones and then includes step by step instructions on how to access, transfer, delete or memorialize each online account. One of the many ways that people have used our Property Search is to locate their loved one’s Facebook profile so that they can decide to memorialize it or delete it. Others already know the link to their loved one’s Facebook profile, but are at a loss of how to actually memorialize, delete or transfer the Facebook account.
Most people haven’t had experience with Facebook’s notification options and ask us for information. They are also likely to find other online accounts after running a digital property search. The average digital property report has returned over seven online accounts that otherwise would have been lost.
With over 1.5m Facebook users set to pass away in 2011, this issue is going to be growing quickly. We’re here to help. If you have any questions about Facebook’s deceased user policies, please contact us. If you’d like to find and claim the digital property of a loved one, you can get started by running an Entrustet Digital Property Search. We’ll automatically search the internet for digital property and send you a report detailing how to access, transfer or delete each online account. We’re also happy to send you a free copy of a sample report so you can see what it’s all about. Email us at info@entrustet.com or write in the comments and we’ll get one your way.
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- access facebook of dead user · facebook asset search · facebook dead friend · facebook death · facebook deceased user policy · facebook help · facebook obits · facebook obituaries · facebook property search · online property search
Caroline Wimmer was brutally murdered by Calvin Lawson on March 28, 2009, “over allegations that she’d told his girlfriend, the mother of his two children, that he was cheating on her with another woman.” She was beaten and then strangled with a hair dryer cord. When the EMT, Mark Musarella, showed up at the scene, he used his Blackberry to take a photo of Ms. Wimmer’s corpse. He later posted that photo to Facebook (he claims accidentally). The family is distraught, even two years after their daughter was murdered.
“I’m just very upset and traumatized over all this,” said Mrs. Wimmer, of Rosebank, fighting back tears on the steps of state Supreme Court, St. George. “I haven’t had a chance to heal yet. This is the second anniversary. We really need to improve our laws in New York. … My daughter’s picture was on the Internet and I can’t get it back.”
“To know those pictures are on Facebook for anyone to see kills me,” said Christina Criscitiello, the victim’s older sister, her voice cracking. “She was brutally beaten. I feel like Mark Musarella took the last shred of dignity she had left. I can’t get those images out of my head. and I don’t want anybody else to see them.”
Musarella was later fired and charged with official misconduct and disorderly conduct, both misdemeanors. He pled guilty and performed 200 hours of community service and had his EMT license taken away. His official misconduct charge was vacated, so only his disorderly conduct charge is on his permanent record.
The family is now suing pretty much everyone involved, which brings up some very interesting legal issues. The family’s attorney believes that Facebook does not have any financial liability:
The Wimmers’ lawyer, Ravi Batra of Manhattan, said federal law provides Facebook “absolute immunity” as a “supposed … nonprofit community bulletin board” from being sued for cash compensation.
This law was created to prevent website owners from being sued for content their members post, as the bulletin boards are simply methods for individuals to release information. One can sue the poster, but not the medium. I fully support this part of the law, assuming there are exceptions that revoke this immunity if a company willfully continues to host an image that should be taken down.
The family also wants Facebook to delete all of the images and provide them with a list of all of the users who accessed the photos while they were online. They also want Facebook to change it’s policies. Says their attorney:
Batra, the lawyer, said Facebook needs to more closely monitor the images users post and that stricter laws must be crafted regarding photo postings. The Wimmers contend the social networking giant is valued at $50 billion and has more than 600 million active users.
“If they’re uploading 10 million pictures a month, they need more screeners,” he said. “We need future victims, if there are any, to [be able to] hold Facebook accountable.”
The problem with the attorney’s argument is that over 2.5 BILLION images are uploaded to Facebook each month, not the 10 million he claims. In fact, there are 960 photos uploaded to Facebook every single second. The attorney’s figure is reached in 3 hours, not an entire month. And those are stats from 2009! It’s likely even higher today, as Facebook has grown by about 200m people since 2009. It’s physically impossible for Facebook to manually screen the images that are uploaded to their servers.
They could implement some sort of “dead body recognition algorithm” but I don’t think that’s feasible either. Facebook’s current system of asking users to flag pictures that are inappropriate works fairly well. I do agree it could be improved upon, but it’s not reasonable to ask Facebook to monitor every single image that’s uploaded.
The case also raised the issue of how someone charged with official misconduct for posting a photo of a dead person on Facebook should be punished:
Tomorrow, [the family] will join state Sen. Diane Savino (D-North Shore/Brooklyn), Assemblyman Michael Cusick (D-Mid-Island) and the rest of the borough’s Albany delegation to announce the introduction of a bill that would raise the criminal classification of official misconduct to a Class E felony.
Currently, official misconduct is a misdemeanor, carrying a maximum penalty of a year in jail. A Class E felony is punishable by up to one and a third to four years in prison.
“It’s sad we have to do this, but the law has to catch up with modern technology,” Ms. Savino said yesterday in a telephone interview. “We don’t want families victimized twice.”
I think that we need to take a step back before changing the law just for official misconduct and see if we should make a law making posting a photo of a deceased person on the Internet, without the family’s permission, illegal. There are laws against mutilating a corpse and I’d argue that posting a photo online is the digital equivalent. States should pass laws that set a standard for how this behavior will be punished, and hopefully raise awareness that posting photos of deceased people is extremely hurtful to the family. I can see a nursing home worker posting a picture of a deceased person on Facebook (in fact, I bet it’s already happened).
As our society moves forward and technology becomes an even bigger part, we need to create rules and social norms that show what is acceptable and what is not. Clearly posting photos of a murder victim crosses the line completely. I’d make posting the photo of a murder victim online punishable by 30 days in jail and a big fine, with escalators for longer jail terms if it’s done maliciously.
It’s sad that we need to cross this bridge, but in the age of social media and instant sharing, it’s a needed step forward.
- Tags:
- caroline wimmer · dead body on facebook · digital death · digital death laws · facebook corpse · facebook death · mark musarella · social networking death · social networking issues
I just updated our estimate of US Facebook users who will pass away this year and it’s up another 23,000 from our last estimate. The last time we published an estimate, the data looked like this:
July 19, 2010 Facebook Death Estimate
We estimated that just under 385,000 US based Facebook users would pass away in the next year. We extrapolated this data to the rest of Facebook’s 500m users and estimated that 1.5m Facebook users worldwide would pass away in the next year. That’s three every single minute! It’s a huge number and it’s growing larger every single day.
I just updated our estimate for 2011 and we’re now estimating that 408,000 US Facebook users will pass away in 2011 and 1.78m worldwide. Here’s our current data:
1/1/11 User Deaths on Facebook Estimate
A few notes on the new data. First, Facebook added about 13m new US users between July and January, while adding about 90m new users outside of the US. For fun, I compared the January data with the data from July to see how Facebook demographics had changed. Here’s what I came up with:
Changing Facebook Death Demographics
This graph subtracts current user numbers provided by Facebook’s advertising platform from their counterparts in July 2010. I found some interesting things.
Facebook has 200k fewer users 14 and under
It’s interesting to me that Facebook lost almost 200k users under the age of 14. Some, if not all, of this change can be attributed to 14 year olds turning 15, but it’s interesting that there were not as many new young kids joining than were either hiding their age or graduating to 15 year olds. This change results in 27 fewer 14 and under Facebook users passing away.
15-19 added 2.4m new users, reach 100+% penetration rate
I checked the number of Facebook accounts in this demographic compared to the CDC’s estimate of US citizens in this demographic and it now shows that Facebook has over 100% penetration rate for kids 15-19, as there are only 22m people this age and 23.2m Facebook users. Some of discrepancy this can be attributed to people creating multiple profiles.
150% of 20-24 year olds in the US are on Facebook, represent 50% of new deaths on Facebook
Like above, there have to be a ton of fake, duplicate profiles in here, but 20-24 year olds, even with a much lower death rate than older people, represented 50% of the new deaths.
Facebook shows declining user numbers from 25-54 year olds
Facebook’s data shows that 25-54 year olds are declining on Facebook. This is probably due to many people deleting their ages all together, but it could be shades of things to come from Facebook.
64+ Represents 50% of new user deaths on Facebook
As more older people join Facebook and Facebook users get older in general, more people are fitting into the 64+ demographic.
Caveats: all of this data comes from Facebook’s own advertising interface, so there’s a chance that the data is not correct. Facebook may have real numbers that are not in their advertising interface, but it’s interesting to follow none the less.
What do you think? Is Facebook declining among younger people? Why are there suddenly so many more 20-25 year olds? What do you think these stats mean?
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- entrusted · entrustet death estimate · facebook and death · facebook death · online death · social networking and death · social networking death
There are 3 billion photos uploaded to Facebook every single month. That means, on average, every Facebook user is uploading about 5 photos every month, or 60 every year. We’ve estimated that 1.5m Facebook users will die this year worldwide, so what does that mean for their photos?
Assuming that all 1.5m Facebook users have been members for 1 year, this means that 90m Facebook photos are uploaded by Facebook users who die each year. I’ve been a Facebook user since 2004 and have over 1000 Facebook photos that I’ve uploaded or have been tagged of me. I bet the total number of Facebook photos is much higher than the 60 we estimated above, because most users have been members for over one year. If we assume that the majority of Facebook users have been members for 2 years, we can estimate that 180m Facebook photos are trapped online each year because the users have passed away.
Since anyone born after about 1999 probably doesn’t have a single physical photo, it’s incredibly important to make sure that your photos are transferred to your family. I have photos from trips around the world, sporting events with my friends and even mundane activities that will be interesting to see 20 years from now and potentially even more interesting to my family after I’m gone.
It’s important to make a plan so you can decide which of your digital photos are transferred to heirs and which are deleted when you pass away. You can start making your plan on Entrustet, or you can start just by thinking about which photos you want kept for posterity, and which you want to be deleted to preserve your legacy.
- Tags:
- facebook death · facebook death stats · facebook photos of dead users
Wisconsin Technology News wrote a story about Entrustet for Veteran’s Day today where they highlight the Justin Ellsworth case and the fact that 1.5m Facebook users die each year. From the story:
Today is Veteran’s Day and we remember Justin Ellsworth, a soldier killed in Iraq in 2004. His family sought access to over more than 10,000 pages of e-mail messages and photographs from Yahoo, who denied their request. An Oakland County judge ordered Yahoo to turn over Ellsworth’s digital assets.
What happens to your online presence when you’re gone? Does Facebook Twitter, Second Life, or Google own your personal data, photos, and videos or is there a succession plan for your heirs? What if you don’t want your heirs to have access to your Facebook account?
- Tags:
- 1.5m facebook users die · facebook death · Justin Ellsworth
