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
I give it......Thursday (tops) before someone is memorialized as a prank.
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
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 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.
Removing that isn't so much privacy as logic. What would it say?
"Status: Dead"
"Status: Still Dead"
"Status: REAL Dead"
"Status: Excitedly Dead"
"Status: Dead Dead"
The Reaper likes this.
I am the lawn!
They should do that and also stamp DECEASED in red block letters diagonally across the picture, like you see on someone's file in the movies.
Sick of people knocking on Gentoo's greatness in completely unrelated
Removing that isn't so much privacy as logic. What would it say?
"Status: Dead"
"Status: Still Dead"
"Status: REAL Dead"
"Status: Excitedly Dead"
"Status: Dead Dead"
Status: Zombie. Want BRAAAAAINS
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.
http://www.abevigoda.com/ffb.php
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.
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.
>> 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
Facebook to preserve accounts of the dead
Does it feel inappropriate that they announce this right before Halloween?
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I hate to nitpick[1], but a werewolf is not a member of the undead: "they're big and scary, they come from Überwald, and if you stab them with a sword they don't die. What more do you want?" you might ask (and someone from Discworld did ask). But this is slashdot, and pedantry runs rampant.
[1] Who am I kidding? I love to nitpick. It justifies my obsession with reading discussions on slashdot.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Werewolves aren't undead. I'd replace them in your list with "middle management".
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
"It just so happens that your status here is only mostly dead. There's a difference between mostly dead, and all dead."
"So... it's complicated?"
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