back to article FACEBOOK even from BEYOND the GRAVE: CHOOSE your Legacy

A new feature from the brobdingnagian jabbercontent ad platform Facebook allows its users to bequeath control of their accounts to loved ones or other selectees when they die. It tries to tread the line between handing over full control and helping those who have lost someone use their memories and contacts to grieve. For some …

  1. ratfox
    Pirate

    Google has a service which gives access to your account to designated people if you don't use it for X months or answer to a few reminders. Does Facebook ask for a death certificate?

  2. Mark 85

    Hmm... marketing opportunity?

    So for those accounts, I'm assuming that FB has found some appropriate but "underserverd" advertisers? Or do those accounts just figure into their total users numbers for the Wall Street gang? This seems a bit weird to me in that just giving your PW as a function of "final instructions" would seem more appropriate.

  3. x 7

    Some of these websites take things too far.......a few months ago I had a mail from "Linked-In" suggesting that Saad Al-Hilli would be a good contact for me. Yes thats right....the chap who was murdered with his family in France a couple of years ago.

    When I complained to Linked-In, asking them how they could be so crass, they simply deleted my Linked-In account for "violations of service" for using what they believed was a false name.

    Absolute morons.

    1. Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

      it’s still very much better than LinkedIn, which regularly asks if friends and colleagues who died many years ago have certain skills

      Yes, I regularly get a "people you might know" list containing a good friend who died a couple of years ago. Even though the person's account no longer seems to exist, and they don't show up in searches. Morons indeed.

  4. stucs201
    Stop

    write your Facebook password on a piece of paper and seal it with any other documents

    No, no, no.

    Boring admin type documents probably need to family.

    Facebook however knows too much. That first needs to go to a close and trusted friend for sanitization. Someone who already knows everything because they were there when it happened.

    1. VinceH

      Re: write your Facebook password on a piece of paper and seal it with any other documents

      "Facebook however knows too much. That first needs to go to a close and trusted friend for sanitization."

      Ah, you mean a bit like a porn buddy.

  5. skeptical i

    Condolences.

    re: "this is written through distressing, bitter experience"

    I'm sorry, peace be unto the departed and serenity unto you.

  6. JamesTQuirk

    Heaven 2.0 ?

    So Heaven 2.0 ? the teenagers, sad people's ego palliative has become the "afterlife", maybe twitter can become confession ....

    1. Blank-Reg
  7. Adam Hartfield

    Having just gone through this too myself for my mother's FB account, anything's better that nothing. When I made the memorializtion request, FB asked for a link to a published obituary. I'm still waiting to hear back from them.

    More troubling than FB, is all of my mother's Kindle books. They're non-transferrable, period, so if anyone in the family wants to read them, we have to keep her Amazon account open and use it.

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