Friends and families of deceased users on Facebook will soon be given the option to turn their profiles into memorials. The new feature will be introduced as a result of several complaints regarding status updates and suggestions about deceased users, according to The Guardian. Information that may be sensitive to relatives or friends of the deceased user, as well as status updates and contacts will be removed by Facebook after the person is confirmed to be dead (either through news articles, obituaries or other proof of death). The newly introduced "Suggestions" feature will no longer remind people to help their dead friend or relative either.
"We understand how difficult it can be for people to be reminded of those who are no longer with them, which is why it's important when someone passes away that their friends or family contact Facebook to request that a profile be memorialized," said Max Kelly, the head of security at Facebook.
In addition, the privacy settings of the user's profile are changed so that only confirmed Facebook friends can view the "memorialised" profile, or find it in search results. They can also post remembrance comments on the deceased person's wall.
"When someone leaves us, they don't leave our memories or our social network. To reflect that reality, we created the idea of "memorialized" profiles as a place where people can save and share their memories of those who've passed," Max said.
And then I was like : " Wow ... FB is going too far. "
Or something along those lines.
Ummmm.. what? Dead talking?
I mean they're saying they will use obituaries/proof of death as proof, but how hard could it be to fake something like that in photoshop etc?
Its the next stage up from Facebook Rape, Facebook murder
Yeah... I already get "facebook raped' Enough as it is, dont need them pronouncing me dead as well every 2 days or so
http://news.google.co.uk/news/story?hl=en&...ved=0CA4QqgIwAA
Although, it is slightly different, as the Suggestions feature wasn't around then, but even Facebook's blog came across in a "new feature" way.
I think I/We are missing something.
EDIT: Ah, it would seem that with the rollout of Facebook's new features, the dead members were included in certain results (such as suggestions), which some users complained about. So all is well it seems
The world's most depressing social network.
This will keep posts from friends and other photos intact without the pain of Facebook constantly reminding you to 'reconnect' with them.
I have always wondered when these social networking sites would sort out something for their deceased users. well done Facebook.
Yet, how to make it easy to use when some one really passed away and making it hard for jokers to make use of it as a practical joke, and how can some one living in a non English speaking country get them a newspaper, will they even understand what it says??
People die and something sensitive needs to be done about their online life, something which will become more and more apparent as time goes by.
In terms of Facebook, someone I went to school with died recently. It's very strange and quite painful to see his profile as if nothing had happened. And yet, deleting him from my friends list because he died seems highly inappropriate.
Or, more appropriately, they could request the profile be deleted. We don't need Facebook to become a giant archive of everyone, living or dead. When I die I really don't need a Facebook profile anymore. Facebook needs to stop acting like we all depend on it.
(too eerie to comment)
"Facebook helps you connect and share with the people in your life, alive or otherwise."
On the other hand... deleting the profile is probably a whole lot better.
imho facebook to me is nothing more than a communication tool... something like having a copy of my friends phone number on my phone... if i know that the number is no longer going to be useful, i wont hesitate to delete it
but for stuff like pictures and stuff, i think its quite ironic to have something hosted online be a permenant memorial to someone, they should put it in some physical form, like burning it onto a disc, or printing out the pictures
Hahah nice. But how many of them will actually be reported?
Even then it would be inaccurate because just as the average death rate is different country to country, so is the percentage of users to population.
The death rate for mid year 2009 was 8.2 in every 1000 people per year. Meaning that around 570 million people die each year (based on this years data).
About 4.3% of the world population uses facebook, so that makes 2.45 Million facebook users die each year. (As a percentage of all world deaths)
Divide this by 365 and you get 67,150 facebook deaths per day.
As I said, that figure is still inaccurate due to differences in death rates between countries and differences in user demographics. A good number of facebook users come from countries that you have lower average death rates.
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