This document discusses what happens to a person's social media accounts and digital assets after they die. It notes that hundreds of thousands of Facebook users die each year, leaving behind personal data and digital legacies. While Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn have policies for memorializing or closing deceased users' accounts, they have not fully addressed the issue of a person's digital afterlife. There is debate between those who want digital assets preserved versus deleted after death. The document calls for social media sites to improve their policies regarding death and provide clearer options for users to determine what happens to their online identities and data after they pass away.

1. Living social, dying digital
Suzanne Long
Kath Straub

2. Torontonian, genealogist
sel@well.com

7. No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to
heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is
the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it.
And that is as it should be, because death is very likely
the single best invention of life. It is life's change agent.
It clears out the old to make way for the new."
Steve Jobs, 2005

12. Credit: Thomas Hawk, Flickr.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/thomashawk/7134121949/

13. Facebook reports that 200,000 of their
almost 900 million active users
worldwide die each year.
Others estimate 500,000+ per year. And
some predict much higher, at 19,000
users dying each day.
Source: allfacebook.com

14. 172 million Facebookers upload 250
million photographs
DAILY
40 million Twitter users write 300
million tweets
22 million different LinkedIn members
make 14 million professionally-related
searches on its platform
Source: mashable.com

15. Facebook hosts 140 billion photographs
in the cloud. That’s 10,000 times larger
than the Library of Congress collection.
Source: 1000memories.com

16. Source: Zhang et al. CHI 2012

17. stakeholders:
social networking sites, user, bereaved,
broader public who want to know what
went before. death workers.

18. Social networking sites encourage users
to create and store a great deal of
personal data.
But they haven’t ‘yet been designed to
acknowledge or engage with the
inevitable death of a user.’
Source: Massimi CHI2011

19. Credit: Thomas Hawk, Flickr.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/thomashawk/6309248314/

20. Facebook
We believe we have put in effective policies that address the accounts that are left
behind by the deceased. When we receive a report that a person on Facebook is
deceased, we put the account in a special memorialized state. Certain more
sensitive information is removed, and privacy is restricted to friends only. The
profile and Wall are left up so that friends and loved ones can make posts in
remembrance. If we're contacted by a close family member with a request to
remove the profile entirely, we will honor that request. People can submit reports
through dedicated forms in our Help Center. These forms are linked to from the
following FAQ. We will provide the estate of the decease with a download of
the account's data if prior consent is obtained from or decreed by the decease, or
mandated by law.
Fred Woolens, Policy Communications.

28. Stated policies
‘Download your
Facebook Memorialization
data’ feature
May help create an
Twitter Deactivation
archive
LinkedIn Close account

29. Twitter

30. Source: The Economist

34. Stated policies
‘Download your
Facebook Memorialization
data’ feature
May help create an
Twitter Deactivation
archive
LinkedIn Memorialize

35. LinkedIn
If we learn that a User is deceased, we may memorialize the User’s account. In
these cases we may restrict profile access, remove messaging functionality, and
close an account if we receive a formal request from the User’s next of kin or other
proper legal request to do so.
Privacy Policy, 2012

38. June 2012

39. Stated policies
‘Download your
Facebook Memorialization
data’ feature
May help create an
Twitter Deactivation
archive
‘Export your
LinkedIn Close account
connections’

40. Credit: Thomas Hawk, Flickr.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/thomashawk/6068122950/
unresolved, coming
soon, new ground, up
for discussion

41. Best practices
•a way to get data out, all of it.
•straightforward, plain language with clear timelines
•a common protocol and language.
•if a public figure, verifiably dead, automagically memorialize.
•organ donation on FB or on privacy updates, tie into something already thinking
about.
•based on things that are similar e.g., doctor’s office form, work HR form, insurance
and RRSP forms

42. Possibilities?
•at sign up allow to identify digital executor or next of kin, who to contact.
•provide a way to report a death that is acted on, if verified in the news
•facebook streaming funerals ?!

43. Deletionists
vs.
Preservationists

44. Huffington Post, March 2012

45. Social media is a part of daily life, so what happens to
the online content that you created once you die? If you
are active online you should consider creating a
statement of how you would like your online identity to
be handled, like a social media will.
April 26, 2012

46. We push our lives into the internet, expecting the web
to function as a permanent and ever-expanding
collective memory, only to discover the web exists only
as a series of present moments, every one erasing the
last.
bygonebureau.com/2011/01/17/link-rot/

47. Resources
Online assets: Deathless data. What happens to our digital property
after we die? http://www.economist.com/node/21553011
Adam Ostrow Editor, Mashable. TED Global 2011
New Scientist Issue 2809, 23 April 2011 http://www.newscientist.com/
special/digital-legacy
Mike Massimi, Wendy Moncur, Jed Brubaker, Richard Stokes,
Richard Banks
Digital Death http://lists.idcommons.net/lists/subscribe/digitaldeath
thedigitalbeyond.com and deathreferencedesk.org
Keep in touch sel@well.com or @suzannelong