Facebook To Memorialise Profiles Of The Deceased
What happens to a Facebook profile after the user dies??? This was the question that was on the minds of some of the people at Facebook too, usually the profile would go dormant and would only be visible to friends and family who were on the profiles account and privacy settings.
But again a heart touching request from a John Berlin from Missouri, whose son had deceased in 2012, for which Facebook took the initiative and worked on it to create the Look Back Videos and memorialised the Account and today Facebook has made that possible for all those other profiles of those who passed away as LookBack Videos for the Friends and Family on the user’s friend list and pertaining to the restrictions and privacy settings that were set in place by the user when they were alive.
In a statement on the memorialising of the profiles Facebook said “Up to now, when a person’s account was memorialized, we restricted its visibility to friends-only. This meant that people could no longer see the account or any of its content unless they were Facebook friends with the person who passed away. Starting today,w e will maintain the visibility of a person’s content as-is. This will allow people to see memorialized profiles in a manner consistent with the deceased person’s expectations of privacy. We are respecting the choices a person made in life while giving their extended community of family and friends ongoing visibility to the same content they could always see.”
In October of last year, XKCD worked on the issue of when Facebook’s deceased users will be more than the living users and came up with an answer that it would roughly occur somewhere in the next 50 to 120 years. So we still would have to ask ourselves for the moment of what would happen to our digital profiles/accounts and existence after us?
