13 Feb 2015
Facebook Heir? Time to Choose Who Manages Your Account When You Die
If they’re granted prior permission, legacy contacts can also download an archive of posts and photos from the deceased, but not the contents of his or her private messages.
All of this is optional. If you do nothing, when Facebook finds out you’ve passed, it will simply freeze your account and leave posts and pictures at the privacy settings you determined, a process it calls memorialization. Facebook says it has done this to hundreds of thousands of accounts to date. (As before, Facebook won’t show advertisements on memorialized accounts.)
Being a legacy contact is different from simply logging into the account of the deceased, and there are important things legacy contacts can’t alter. They can’t edit what the deceased has already posted, or what his or her friends post on the page. If you chose to post a photo while you are living that looks embarrassing when you are gone, your legacy contact can’t do anything about it. A legacy contact also can’t decide to delete a whole account.
These restrictions might upset some people who think their job as a caretaker is to maintain a Facebook page as the nicest possible memorial. “We gave this a lot of thought, and ultimately decided against it for this first version,” said spokeswoman Jodi Seth. Facebook feared that curation responsibilities might add an extra emotional load to grieving, among other concerns.
To select your legacy contact, go to Settings and choose Security and then Legacy Contact at the bottom of the page—it is the same for the Facebook website or mobile app. There you can designate an existing Facebook friend (in other words, only someone who’s already part of the social network), grant that person permission to download an archive of your data, or choose to have your account deleted after death.
There’s more fine print worth paying attention to: You can select only one person—and no backup—so spouses and partners who often travel together may face a difficult choice about whether to designate each other. Ms. Seth says Facebook is continuing to think about how it might allow for contingent legacy contacts.
Facebook members can change their legacy contact selection at any time, but once they have died, a legacy contact can’t pass along the responsibility to someone else.
If you don’t choose a legacy contact on Facebook but name a digital heir in a legal will, Facebook will designate that person.
It’s exhausting to think that Facebook has become so interwoven into our lives that we not only have to think about setting our birthdays, relationships and jobs in stone there, but now also our deaths. Still, Facebook’s new service empowers people to make choices about their data while they are living, and for many, that’s a relief.
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