When Facebook was first created, the intent was to help college students find friends and like-minded people on campus, so the last thing on their mind was relating to what happens to an account after someone dies. You can’t just ignore the topic, however, because as Facebook has grown from thousands to millions to billions of users, there’s now a huge archive of information each of us leaves on the site when that fateful day arrives.
By default, however, there’s not much that happens and the account will likely just go dormant if you don’t specify or do anything. Facebook doesn’t trust the “parent/child” relationship or spouse relationship specified on FB accounts, for example, so your husband or wife won’t just be able to log in to your account and read through everything, post updates, etc. When my father passed, it was weird to see his account still on the site and even show up occasionally with “memories” and birthday reminders.
Facebook has a page that explains how to report someone having died, Someone actually analyzed death rates and ascertained back in 2013 that “about 290,000 US Facebook users will die in 2013. The worldwide total for 2013 is likely several million. In just seven years, this death rate will double, and in seven more years it will double again.” As a result, they estimate that Facebook will have more accounts for dead people than living by 2060 or thereabouts. Then it can just be called CreepyBook, right? Yikes.
Phew. Okay. Back to topic. Facebook has a feature where you can specify your legacy person, so let’s have a look. Go to Settings and it’s right on the General Account Settings page:
See it near the bottom? “Manage Account” lets you “modify your legacy contact settings”. Click on that and a rather detailed page shows up:
Basically there are two choices for your legacy account: either you can set it to delete your account upon FB being notified of your death, or you can specify a friend (or family member, though it doesn’t say that) to be your legacy contact. As explained, a legacy contact can pin a post to your timeline, respond to friend requests and update a profile picture. They cannot gain access to your messages, however, and all of this transpires after legal notification of your death.
I’ll choose my sister to be my legacy contact to see what happens. To do that, I just type her name in the box and the opportunity to message her (which is entirely appropriate) shows up:
I did warn her beforehand so she didn’t think I was suddenly being suicidal or anything, you might consider doing the same for your own legacy contact if you choose one. On my own side, I received this email notification once the change was accepted:
I hope to never see this show up without me making the change, that’s for sure!
There’s one more setting you might want to consider, whether or not your legacy contact should be able to download all the data from your account. Well, almost all, as explained:
That’s it. But now let’s say you don’t want to set someone to be your legacy contact. The alternative is to specify that you want your account deleted upon Facebook notification of your passing. Click on “Request account deletion” and this is what you’ll see:
Those are the main choices. Now you know and can make an informed decision.
Note: While we’re talking about Facebook, I invite you to follow Ask Dave Taylor on Facebook too! Thanks.
