Facebook, Google and Twitter: what happens to your online accounts when you’re dead?
- Our digital lives will go on far longer than our physical ones, but how do we manage our privacy when we’re gone?
- Companies like Facebook and Google are allowing users to assign caretakers to look after their accounts once they die
When someone you love dies, their spirit endures – and so does their social media. And when their photos, memories or posts surface unexpectedly, it can be jarring for those that are still healing from the loss.
Managing the digital afterlife is “something that people should think about but don’t”, says Jed Brubaker, a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder in the United States, who specialises on the topic. “There’s a whole societal infrastructure – coroners, cemeteries, funeral directors – for how we think about death,” he says. “For the most part, that has not extended very well to digital content broadly and social media specifically.”
That can lead to some painful situations.
You may have braced for that birthday reminder, for instance, but then Facebook unexpectedly surfaces an “on this day” memory that just hits you in the gut. LinkedIn nudges you to congratulate a colleague on a work anniversary just a few days after a heart attack took them. Not just awkward, but ouch. That hurts.
It’s not that we necessarily want all social records and reminders to go away. Just recently, Twitter pulled an about-face following a backlash when it announced plans to purge some inactive accounts. Folks didn’t want to lose tweets from loved ones who have died.