Last week Facebook announced via their blog that they will allow friends and family of deceased Facebook users to have their profiles ‘memorialised’.
These memorialised profiles will remain on Facebook and friends of passed users can leave comments on their profile Walls “in remembrance”. Privacy settings on memorialised accounts will be increased so that only already existing friends will be able to see the profiles of their deceased friends. Sensitive information such as contact details and status updates will also be removed.
Max Kelly, a member of the Facebook development team who announced the new feature, said, “ when someone leaves us, they don’t leave our memories or our social network.” He seems to be missing that there is a difference between a person’s social network and a person’s social networking web applications.
Personally, I’d prefer that in the event of my death my Facebook profile would be removed and not left there to accumulate messages of remembrance from people who I only added as friends because they kept nodding at me on the street.
This new feature seems to have been created as a direct result of the website’s latest face lift. A new addition in the redesign launched last week included automated suggestions to “reconnect with” friends that you haven’t been interacting with via Facebook recently. This lead to a number of Facebook users being asked to reconnect with friends of theirs that had died, but whose profiles’ remained.
Facebook have set up a form that allows family members or friends of a deceased user to memorialise their profile. They require “proof of death” in the form of an obituary or newspaper article.
Depending on exactly how much they actually look into the memorialisation applications, it could easily lead to many still-living Facebook users being declared deceased. These potential pranks can be pulled off comfortably just as long as you know a few personal details about someone, which you can retrieve from their Facebook profile, and you can get someone to mock-up a local newspaper website’s obituaries section.
Social networking sites such as Facebook have managed to ingrain themselves effectively into our lives, but trying to stay with us in death – that’s not something I like.
To read more about memorialising accounts visit blog.facebook.com.
