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Can Twitter and Facebook Deal With Their Dead?
Barence writes "One and a half million Facebook users die each year. Twitter faces a similar mortality rate. Yet the social networks have been relatively slow to deal with the uncomfortable business of death. Only this week has Twitter finally unveiled a policy for handling the accounts of dead members. Yet the process for closing the accounts of deceased relatives is complicated, while reminders to follow the accounts of people who have long since passed away continue to arrive, adding to the pain of grieving friends and relatives."
You know what, before I die I will create a program that posts random predefined messages to my Facebook account after I have died. One of the morning messages could be "having a morning coffee with satan" and late night message could be "man do I appreciate cold beer right now".
You only die once. The least you can do is have some fun creeping out people about it.
But in order to achieve this, the grieving relatives must send Twitter their full name and contact details, an explanation of their relationship to the deceased, the user name of the Twitter account and links to a public obituary that provides proof of death.
That's ridiculous; Netcraft confirmation should suffice.
.
Trolling is a art,
Automated systems are insensitive. News at 11.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
It's not just a problem with social networks, of course; the question of what to do with a site when the owner dies is a question that has to be dealt with by all websites.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Maybe it would be nice for social networking services to have a "key escrow" feature, or some way where trusted people who know the person can validate the account as dead automatically and have it disabled, similar to having key revokers in PGP that can yank a public key if the private key gets lost.
This feature would be up to the discretion of the individual, because this could be quite easily abused.
Who in their right mind pokes a dead person?
A very good friend of mine was murdered in October of 2008 (for those of you in Toronto/Ontario/Canada, Bailey Zaveda, the girl that was gunned down while outside of a bar having a cigarette) by someone she didn't know and had no involvement with.
Anyway, her facebook account still exists, and I don't see the problem with that. Everyone knows what happened to her, and her profile served as part of the grieving process for many people. To this day, they post their latest happenings in their lives on her wall, say happy birthday to her, etc.
I mean, if the interest here is to get the facebook.com/username or twitter userid back, then revoke those after say, 1 year of inactivity, but I don't see the harm in leaving the account there for people to reminisce, grieve, or whatever.
The problem would be greatly simplified if people kept a private record of all the services they use (or at least, the major ones), with login and password details. Have the list secured away somewhere, to be given to next of kin at time of death. That way they can be managed properly by whoever has to deal with the estate.
As people give more and more importance to their online presence, they need to think about how to take care of that presence in the same way they do the deed of their house, their car, etc.
When someone dies, their junk mail stops. It's pretty creepy when you notice this.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
"One and a half million Facebook users die each year."
That's about 3 times as many annual deaths as tobacco users!
Where's the Bureau of Alcohol, Twitter, and Facebook when you need them?
There ought to be an automatic expiry based on the activity of the account.
E.g. after 2 months inactivity the account is put on hold (no reminders/messages sent to linked friends), then after say 18 months further inactivity the account is removed.
There would still be a period of shit the relatives and friends would have to go to through with getting messages etc but at least the issue could naturally resolve itself?
Why is it so difficult to just wait X days, and then close the account? You know, like other sites-which-don't-want-to-make-money-off-your-personal-information do ?
I was at the Federated Social Web Summit this July, and over drinks, I was discussing this issue with other open source social networking developers. I mentioned that I've had a few friends pass who still have a presence on the social web (livejournal, facebook, myspace), and I really appreciate being able to go back and remember them that way. I also mentioned that their parents have access to their accounts, so people would get especially unnerved when that "online now" icon would show up or when they would pop up in a chat list, because their parents were checking or closing out their account.
I had a little too much to think, so I posited the idea of a system which learns, based on what you've posted, how to post like you after you're gone. Not a full representation, but a way to continue to create an impression of you. Less like Sonny from I, Robot, and more like Mal from Inception. A shadow of a person, based on what people remember. Or, more specifically, what the system remembers. Since conceivably, generations born in 2000 and up will live their whole lives on the social web, systems will have a lot of information with which to recreate a person's personality. When I suggested this, someone asked, "Why would I have to wait until I died to use this?"
I won't be coding this into Appleseed, because for now, it violates the "Don't Be Creepy" rule that sometimes people break when building prediction software. But there's no reason it can't be done, which means at some point, someone will do it.
Michael Chisari
Appleseed - http://opensource.appleseedproject.org/
Yeah... Looking forward to the new groups. "Need 250 more people to poke my recently deceased grandma!"
I didn't realise using Facebook and Twitter was such a risky endeavour.
It almost looks like they just took the number of active FB accounts, supposedly a bit over 500 million...and divided by 365? I don't think there's such level of recycling of population, nvm how FB users aren't in the age groups with mortality even close to average of the population.
And if one day they will become representative - that, sort of, will at the same time resolve the issue. People "dissapear" all the time and societies manage to cope - if only because of how death is typically a process, poeple often tend to vanish from social life some time before actually dying. It will be similar with FB probably / their accounts will be typically long abandoned.
One that hath name thou can not otter
Dead members can't cancel their accounts. They are very convenient for padding your membership numbers, which makes you look better to the market analysts/investors. The motivation for them to do the honest thing and remove the accounts is that now, finally, someone pointed it out publicly so the charade is blown and the dishonestly is bad PR.
Rules of Conduct:
#1 - The DM is always right.
#2 - If the DM is wrong, see rule #1
My daughter died 2 months ago in a car accident. Many of her family and friends still post messages to her Facebook page telling her how much we miss her. I'm not sure if it's helping or hindering the grieving process, but at least for me, it's been nice to hear from all the people who loved her. Some share memories while others just say they were thinking about her. There have been links to YouTube videos of sad songs, sappy (but sweet) poetry, and slideshows of her. At least for now, I can't even bring myself to delete her from my contacts in my phone, let alone delete her Facebook profile.
I crave immortality.
Have gnu, will travel.
"while reminders to follow the accounts of people who have long since passed away continue to arrive, adding to the pain of grieving friends and relatives"
I had a coworker who died roughly a year ago - and older guy who took me under his wing and taught me quite a bit. After he passed away his wife took over his account and posted pictures of him and both of them together when they were young. I thought it was an amazing celebration of his life and was a neat way for her to interact with people whose lives he had touched as well. For someone to say an account adds to the pain - I'd say that's highly subjective. People all handle death differently - let the individuals decide what's painful and what's not.
Web Crawler: Bring out yer dead.
[a Robots.txt responds to the request with a packet]
Robots.txt: Here's one.
Web Crawler: That'll be nine bytes.
Dead Person's Webpage: I'm not dead.
Web Crawler: What?
Robots.txt: Nothing. There's your nine bytes.
Dead Person's Webpage: I'm not dead.
Web Crawler: 'Ere, he says he's not dead.
Robots.txt: Yes he is.
Dead Person's Webpage: I'm not.
Web Crawler: He isn't.
Robots.txt: Well, he will be soon, he's got bitrot.
Dead Person's Webpage: I'm getting better. Look, new content from friends and family.
Robots.txt: No you're not, you'll be stale content in a moment. No more page requests.
Web Crawler: Well, I can't take him like that. It's against regulations. Robots.txt, you should take him off your Disallow list.
Dead Person's Webpage: I don't want to go to the 404.
Robots.txt: Oh, don't be such a baby.
Web Crawler: I can't take him.
Dead Person's Webpage: I feel fine.
Robots.txt: Oh, do me a favor.
Web Crawler: I can't.
Robots.txt: Well, can you 302 temporarily redirect him for a couple of days? He won't be long.
Web Crawler: I promised I'd be at the Facebooks'. They've lost nine today.
Robots.txt: Well, when's your next round?
Web Crawler: 20100821 04:32:55 UTC.
Dead Person's Webpage: I think I'll go for a retweet.
Robots.txt: You're not fooling anyone, you know. Isn't there anything you could do?
Dead Person's Webpage: Status Update: I feel happy. Status Update: I feel happy.
[Web Crawler spiders up and down the fibre optic pipe furtively, then silences the Webpage with a whack of his delisting]
Robots.txt: Ah, thank you very much.
Web Crawler: Not at all. See you on 20100821 04:32:55 UTC.
Robots.txt: Right.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
But I get social networking website email invites all the time. I never read them (partially because they are a popular virus vector now) and rarely even catch the name in the subject line. I really can't imagine being offended by an invite from a dead person; it's just an automated email from an automated system.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
As a funeral director I can make a few observations.
Deleting the accounts is a bad idea. Many of these accounts serve as online memorials to people's loved ones. Even if the person is no longer around to post or update their profiles, loved ones may take comfort in the fact that the deceased is still in their social network. Many of the people using social networks are still young people and most of their deaths are unexpected (accidents, suicides, homicides) and many of the survivors are still dealing with the reality of the situation. I think many of these companies need to be sensitive to the needs of the grieving and in an age where user loyalty is everything they should hold onto these accounts in the interests of of being sensitive to the grieving who make up part of their still alive user base.
If you ever want access to the content of somebody who died then you need to have the executor of the estate forward a page from the will outlining who the executor of the will is and a copy of the funeral director's proof of death. If you try and wait for official copies of the government's proof of death you could be looking at a 2 year wait. Also forward the name of the funeral home who handled the arrangements in case they have any questions. If you are not the executor or the person who made the arrangements then you need to get in touch with them and get their permission. It doesn't matter if you were the deceased's favorite brother the law in most places favors the executor.
Now all this being said, I need to caution loved ones that in the case of an unexpected death (like a suicide), trying to obtain access to people's social network data may be part of looking for answers as to why it happened. As somebody who has read a fair share of suicide notes and heard a lot of stories about circumstances surrounding sudden deaths I can tell you that sometimes are better off not knowing. You may learn secrets about your loved one you really did not want to know and it may cause damage to your opinion of them. A lot of private communications contains information we would not want to share with our loved ones and sometimes its best if loved ones don't know it (even after a death). So before you go charging into trying to go through all this information ask yourself if you are really prepared for what you might find. Did you really want to know that your loving married father was being unfaithful or your baby sister you adored had a serious debt and meth problem?
Well, yeah - I mean, ADSL sucks; of COURSE they're going to look at you funny. You should at least look into fiber, which is at least somewhat futureproof.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
Nah wireless is more convenient. As long as you don't hold the phone in a death-grip.