Slashdot Mirror
Facebook To Preserve Accounts of the Dead
Barence writes "Social-networking site Facebook is planning to preserve the accounts of dead members. The new 'memorialized' accounts will continue to display photos and wall posts, but remove 'sensitive information' such as status updates and contact information. Friends or family who want to report the death of a Facebook member are encouraged to fill out the site's Deceased form. The form asks for proof of death, such as an obituary or news article, although it's not clear how Facebook can validate the death of a member if neither of those pieces of information is published on the internet. How long before someone snuffs it on Facebook before their time?"
They're making a wise decision: status updates and contact information for dead people pretty much define "sensitive information."
DEADGUY: "Status: Bones yellowed, but still have some structure. Rat finally got away with St. Anthony medallion. Anyone gonna to go the open bar at Styx tonight?!"
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
"Status: Dead"
"Status: Still Dead"
"Status: REAL Dead"
"Status: Excitedly Dead"
"Status: Dead Dead"
I give it......Thursday (tops) before someone is memorialized as a prank.
How long before someone snuffs it on Facebook before their time?
I'm sure hundreds have already. I'd expect their friends and relatives would appreciate this service, but I wonder how they're going to deal with photoshopped obituaries. I'd expect they'd naturally try to contact the user directly, but what if they're AFK for a number of days or more?
MilkMiruku
Be sure and leave a comment on Stephen King's page. Truly an American icon.
I'm sure "SlashdotMedia" will improve on all the wonders that Dice Holdings blessed us all with
who updates their pictures ?!?
preserve the accounts of the dead? Well I say preserve the accounts of the living first, heck my account's been "unavailable" on and off for over 2 months now :/
This is good. A friend of mine committed suicide a little over a year ago and her Facebook page is the primary place that people talk about her, both right after the event and at various marker points. It's nice to check in on her page and see if anyone has posted anything new when I'm thinking about her.
I think they should turn all the pictures of you black and white. (or at least your profile pic)
I like the "memorialized" version of the page. How bad do you think it would be for someone to look through pictures of the recently deceased, go back to the profile and see all kinds of "Hey man, haven't seen you in a while...where've you been?" posts... I just hope there's no "Like" option for the change.
Did anyone else think "Accounts of the Dead" would be a great George Romero movie?
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
This is a pretty funny "issue", one of those things that I don't think they ever even thought of before it came up... I actually recently lost a brother, and I'd been wondering what was going to happen to his page.
weinersmith
http://www.facebook.com/abevigodists
... I'm not dead yet ... He's only Mostly Dead ... Braaaaaainnsssssss
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
On a limited basis; are they now going to be preserving the account forever?
It was something like 60 days IIRC (probably 30 or 90 given my memory). After this period of time, the account would be deleted.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
People won't bother to claim they died if it means it locks them out of their account as well.
After all, a real dead person can't update his/her status.
. . . . deathswitch?
I assume that they will then be allowed to use the pictures and whatever other data those people uploaded as they wish. Good move Facebook! The dead are unlikely to complain about terms of services.
Myspace, in their desperate bid to stay relevant against Facebook, will introduce the "pour a 40" option, which is exactly the same; but much tackier.
What about people who aren't actually dead, but have jumped the shark?
didn't this come up before, and there were serious privacy violations/other issues involving facebook trying to keep up dead people's profiles? I don't remember if it was a celebrity thing.
http://www.abevigoda.com/ffb.php
Facebook account says he's still alive.
Nullius in verba
that I'm not the only one who finds this creepy. But what do I know, I'm one of those curmudgeons that don't use any social networking sites. I just really hope that they allow relatives of deceased people to not just move accounts of the dead to the Facebook Cemetery, but also to have them removed completely. Maybe relatives don't want the deceased person's posts and pics to be available to everyone forever. Heck, maybe the deceased person themselves wanted his or her account removed in case of death.
This optional feature has been around on FB for the past year. It's similar to the "In memory of" you see on the backs of some peoples' cars, only it catalogs a place full of content he or she posted themselves. Some people like having their FB wall to write postmortem messages, or to tell them they are missed. I like the idea as it makes coping easier, IMO.
Facebook is now the only way I hear or know about some members of my extended family and old friends. Sure, if facebook didn't exist, I would (may?) have made contact in some other way, but for now, it's what works. As long as it is the de facto standard for keeping in touch, memorializing accounts can allow for the shared grief between people I might not otherwise be able to commiserate.
Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still valiantly holding on in his fight to remain dead.
The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.
When I found out that my brother had cancer, one of the first things that I did was talk to my dad about getting account info for his email and MySpace page. Matt never moved over to Facebook. When he died, we were able to send a message to his friends, and let people know what happened. A friend of his set up a FaceBook group to remember him. It has been a huge help to read stories and good thoughts from the people who knew him. I am glad that FaceBook is doing this.
Rest in Peace Matt.
Dead for tax purposes.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
Suppose I give my password to a sibling. Can the account still be accessed? As an atheist, I would be amused if my brother updated a facebook entry maybe once a year on my birthday. "Still dead. Still no sign of god."
Here's a thought - dead people's friends will eventually die. It follows that entire social circles will eventually die. This almost makes me hope that Facebook will thrive for the next however many years so someone can make one of those social-circle friend-of-friend graphs you sometimes see, except animated to show changes over time with dead links - no pun intended - graying out. Would probably be quite interesting and maybe pretty - growing at the edges, new nodes blossoming into existence, old connections fading, old nodes darkening. Like a more random version of Conway's Game of Life.
You're a pretty lousy atheist if you entertain the idea of being "amused" after death.
Now I understand why everyone is dying to get on Facebook!
So, you believe in the afterlife, or you mean you'd be amused, if you were still around to care...
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
I hope they use a nice CSS for the page... shades of grey mainly. Will they grey out rgb profile pics too? :)
>> Social-networking site Facebook is planning to preserve the accounts of dead members. The new 'memorialized' accounts will continue to display photos and wall posts, but remove 'sensitive information' such as status updates and contact information.
So... basically what you are saying is Facebook's new data retention policy is "we retain your data forever, no excuses."
-- I was raised on the command line, bitch
I've also thought about how I have some friends who don't know any of my other friends. If either of us died, there would normally be no way for the other to find out about it through the grapevine. But now with Facebook, we would probably find out by seeing other people's wall posts. I think that's actually a valuable service.
What if the a person died from being a Facebook addict? I guess it would be like those who die from playing too much games. This person wouldn't eat, drink or sleep properly but instead just hang on Facebook until finally his/her body gives up. The irony that this person must continue to have a Facebook profile, the very thing that killed him/her -- even in death, is just weird.
Facebook is always telling me "Reconnect with X", where X is my friend who committed suicide. It kind of bothered me the first time it happened, although now I just see it as darkly humorous.
Microsoft: The Monopoly Created By I.B.M.?
Yours In Novosibirsk,
K. Trout
Snuffing it on facebook before your time is not much of an issue, as they explicitly don't disable the account's ability to actually log in. If you wake up one day to find out you're dead, you can still log in, and that provides a pretty decent avenue for contesting the claim.
And I'd rather not go into how I know.
ob: Monty Python
I'm not dead yet!
Yes he is.
No I'm not.
Is there something you can do?
[thwack]
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Facebook to preserve accounts of the dead
Does it feel inappropriate that they announce this right before Halloween?
/* No Comment */
Facebooks of the Dead. It does sound scary.
I wonder about people who use aliases on facebook (we KNOW they exist but aren't "allowed" in the facebook TOS) I have had two friends die in the past six months (One from cancer, another in a fire) who both used aliases. How does one go about having these people memorialized/removed from facebook if no obituary or news article exists using the alias? Granted there would be some obvious signs - facebook groups in memory of, memories on the walls, a stoppage to facebook updates etc. - but if the rule is hard and fast you're toast.
I call it 'The Aristocrats'
That thing jumping over you is a web2 remnant....
I'm certain twitter will have an auto twat service for the dead. "This twit is no more" "He has ceased to be". .....
Well, I guess this opens up a new field in horror writing!
Teen Angel - a Ghost Story
although it's not clear how Facebook can validate the death of a member if neither of those pieces of information is published on the internet.
*gasp* don't tell me someone will have to do a real world verification!! we will never achieve the Matrix if the real world keeps holding us back!!
What about all those people that everyone knows is dead, but aren't? Abe Vigoda for example.
How much time are the facebook administrators really going to spend for people like this? I doubt they will spend much more time than the slashdot editors spen on any one article.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
I just killed off Bill Gates (bill-gates on facebook), I found all I needed to know on wikipedia and google to fill out the deceased form, and I did it as Paul Allen and used http://www.billgatesisdead.com/ as proof. While I know it will never fly and surely they will throw it out, it was rather satisfying trying.
until the drive space is taken up? Drive storage can get expensive.
That which does not kill me only postpones the inevitable.
That'd be a little creepy.......
"You can't really dust for vomit" --Nigel Tufnel
Na, call the movie "DeathBook"
plot: someone tells Facebook that you are dead and HOW you die by a freak accident. Then, within 24 hours, that said freak accident REALLY kills you.
Quick! somebody create a DeathBook.com web site!
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
We've looked to people's personal letters and diaries in the past to gain incite on how they viewed the events of their days. Even in this modern era of information, how much of this window will be lost to future generations, as people are able to better control access to their personal material? I doubt my email will be as accessible as my great grandfathers letters in a hundred years. Apparently, my facebook page will be gone as well. I'm not saying its a bad thing, I for one value that I can keep personal correspondence private. I just wonder how future generations will view it.
Facebookers are dead on the inside anyway.
I recently received an automated "friend suggestion" for someone I knew who died almost two years ago. Freaked me out a bit.
RIP Sheldon Brown
Why on earth are they proposing to use obituaries? Instead, they should be thinking in terms of the normal documentation required when winding up someone's estate after they die; a death certificate or a notarized copy of one. This isn't as big a hassle as all that, since the executors have to handle all this stuff anyway in order to sort out the deceased's financial affairs...
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
That is not proof of death. A registered death certificate is proof of death.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
This sounds like a nice idea, but I have to wonder about the estate and inheritance laws issues around this. Any lawyers out there care to speculate on whether you can leave your FB (or other site) account to someone in your will? Should the executor of your estate be granted access to the page to leave updates?
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
They should have a setting in the user profile for what to do if you're reported dead. I'd personally prefer that the account be "disappeared" - same as deleted but the data kept there in case the death report was a prank or something, so I wouldn't lose all my data.
Or maybe someone wants the data to be kept there but everything locked.
The internet has finally reached out to bring unity to the two types of people without a life.
although it's not clear how Facebook can validate the death of a member if neither of those pieces of information is published on the internet.
You are not dead...
if there's no info on the internet.
I'd like to see how long someone can remain alive on the Net after they are dead. Multiple bank accounts that automatically move money between them, bots that keep social network and email accounts alive, that sort of thing.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
Facebook is always telling me "Reconnect with X", where X is my friend who committed suicide. . .
And now we all wanna know did your friend snuff it because you un-friended her on FB?
Well - did she, you cold-hearted evil bastard?
A registered death certificate is proof of death
Unless people feel that your death certificate is inadequate proof of your death, in which case you'll have to ... ahhh, screw it they'll never be satisfied.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Facebook has been harassing me to add my dead mother as a friend since shortly after she died. It's kind of annoying.
There will probably be an onslaught of dead people on Facebook.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
The form collects the date of birth only, not when they died.
Here are the fields:
* Full Name on the account
* Date of birth
* Account email addresses, which may have been used to create the account)
* Networks, which the person may have been in (e.g., the Stanford University educational network)
* Relationship to the person:
* Proof of death:an obituary or news article
* Additional information
(URL: http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=deceased )
Stephan
http://stephan.sugarmotor.org
Over at The Chess Variants page, there used to be a rather prolific inventor named Ralph Betza. Not only was he a very strong Chess player (FIDE master), he also invented dozens of chess variants and was the first person to come up with a lot of innovative Chess Variant pieces.
We haven't heard from him in years. We don't know whether he is alive or dead. It would have been nice if there was some way for his family to inform us who only knew him through the internet about his (possible) death.
Also, as the primary maintainer of an open-source project, I have just given my family the email address of my webmaster so that they can let him know just in case I have an untimely death (no, I have no plans to die; I plan on soon getting married to my fiancée and staying married to her for many decades), in addition to a link to Facebook's deceased form.
This way, should the unspeakable happen and I die, people know about it right away and can figure out who will become the maintainer of my open-source project.
MaraDNS is an open-source DNS server.
...Then right before April 1st.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
"The evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones"
-- Mark Anthony
See what happened yesterday, when geocities died? facebook may not even live more longer than many of us do..
I for one welcome our new Dead Facebook Overlords.
Five words describe me on a normal day. two words describe me the rest of the time. can you guess?
You know, I was actually thinking about this the other day--now that everyone posts their every little thought and whim on the internet, the footprints we leave after death will be HUGE. No more "Mommy, what was grandpa like when he was younger?" Go check out his myspace page...
I hope Facebook gives families an option to edit the content of profiles after the person dies so they can save face for him/her. I don't know about you, but I wouldn't want one of my siblings to be remembered for something like doing keg stands on video. Sure, the portrayals would be skewed, but its not like funerals are any different.
although it's not clear how Facebook can validate the death of a member if neither of those pieces of information is published on the internet.
Well, in America there is this thing called the Social Security Death Master File if you need to verify that someone has died. Its not immediate, but its better than nothing at all.
Non sequitur: Your facts are uncoordinated.
I'm thinking this is a fallout from the recent Facebook changes. I've noticed it started making suggestions to do things like:
"suggest a photo" for a facebook user with no profile pic
"suggest friends" for a newer facebook user with only a handful of friends so far
"write on a friend's wall" for a friend in your list you haven't talked to in a while
The thing about that last one is that there is a friend we have who passed away about a year ago. It's nice to have her account still active as we can look at pictures and whatnot. The daily reminders that you haven't talked to this person in a while, though, can be a little cruel. Our group of friends is not likely the only people who have this experience, and I can definitely understand if there were a ton of complaints or questions on how to get dead people off this feature. The simplest implementation for Facebook would be to just treat dead users as archived accounts. Leave the data there and make it accessible, but leave it off any kind of actively updating list.
Yes, but it will be changed to indicate that you are poking them with a stick.
If fate makes you a motorcycle, you become a motorcycle.
It's called copy and paste. Duh!
I can make sure my dad's account gets permanently deleted before FB makes this (a) mandatory and (b) automatic.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Built and opted into by the people, not by a tyrannical government.
I would imagine that there's a lockout due to inactivity. Wouldn't that serve the same purpose?
I Should have listened to Chris de Burgh, I paid the Ferryman, bad things happened.
Jodi Arias is accused of Killing Travis Alexander in Arizona. Both have myspace pages. Jodi is in jail awaiting trial and has not logged in since her arrest, however, someone logged into Travis's account 2 months after he was killed. Maybe he is not dead and she is innocent? :)
No one has marked his page indicating his status. Who the heck would remove it if no one tells myspace?
That girl is nutz, just watch her interview.
I'm getting better.
f u cn rd ths u cn gt a gd jb n cmptr prgmng
A good friend of mine committed suicide in August and Facebook 'suggested' that I 'reconnect.'
A Poll could be set up in the Deceased Accounts:
Gone to:
[Heaven]
[Hell]
Still dead...
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Eventually there will be more dead people recorded than living and facebook will have to change it's name.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
I think this is a good idea, as long as the "deceased" accounts are exempted from Facebook's recently implemented context ads. For those not familiar with them, on one's homepage, suggestions for wishing people a happy birthday or reconnecting with someone with whom you've not interacted for a while appear like ads in the right-hand column. However, in some cases, there is a good reason we haven't written on each others' walls in a while. Today, Facebook suggested to me that I reconnect with a dead friend of mine. While I'm not sensitive enough, nor was I close enough to this person, for it to be a emotional burden for me, I fear this could cause some distress for family and other close friends of the deceased. I hope that this new policy includes a more sensitive treatment of the dead person's account info and how it is used on other's Home pages.
As Expected of a CIA Operation. The Dead tell no lies, and are nearly as useful for data-mining as the living.
I've already seen it happen, as a prank on a friend. Thats what happens when your devious friends know your Facebook password.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Will Facebook continue to count these dead people as current users, perhaps for the purpose of selling advertising? Sure they can say the have 300 million users, but then they'll say, "oh and by the way, ??? million of them are dead."
Also, I have a friend (not a close friend) who died nearly 2 years ago, nobody has yet reported him dead, I would but I don't have any proof of his death (no obituary published). I guess he's immortal in the eyes of Facebook management. I think in a situation such as this Facebook should try to contact the person and if there is no response in a reasonable amount of time then they should deactivate the account.
When I read this I was talking about WoW to someone and thought it was Blizzard that was offering this. I thought, hey that's pretty neat. But the reality is, it's just facebook. The place where there are thousands of fake profiles of fictional characters, historic people who have long past, etc.
If someone dies, and I remove them as my friend, does their ghost feel sad?
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Under this view, keeping my cousins avatar is an expression of sentiment akin to keeping photographs. AND THAT IS OK.
We are defined by the impressions/memories other people have of us. Death is the point in time where you no longer can influence those memories.
Keeping his Mii helps you remember him. Just like photos / urns.
(Don't be to persistent about transferring your dead cousin's Mii to friends that have no relation to him, though.)
I lost my sig.
Facebook's after death policy, like their before death policy, is of no practical value or meaning to Facebook subscribers. For those of you who haven't clued in yet, facebook.com is Facebook's website, NOT yours. It was never and will never be 'your' Facebook profile, it is Facebook's profile about you. Facebook is free to make up and change the rules for their website, and even ignore their own 'rules', just as I can on my website. If you want to be self possessed, to have control over your own identity, then never ever lend it to Facebook or the like! Get and use your OWN domain name for your website and email, or at least one over which you have an iota of control, like your work email. If you don't, you can't complain any more than you can complain about being kicked out of a home you naively built on someone else's land or about being manipulated with the threat of eviction. If you're not in full control of your identity, then what's the point in being you?! Some things you have to do yourself, like vote, or have a bank account, socialize, or own a domain name. Nobody can own your domain name for you.
The full story is at MY website: http://www.harmsen.net/shut_your_facebook.html
Leif Harmsen
This is a great way for friends and family to keep an online memorial for those who have passed away. It's a reminder of the life that the person had before they were gone.
Kristi Hines