What happens to your online social profile when you die? Well, it’s not something anyone really wants to think about, but in this day and age it’s something that needs to be addressed.
Facebook’s old policy was to maintain friends-only memorialized pages. But, as Facebook is prone to do, they changed their minds. Your family members can still choose to have your page memorialized, but once they do, those privacy settings are staying in death exactly as they were in life.
In a blog post, Facebook explained the change: Up to now, when a person’s account was memorialized, we restricted its visibility to friends-only. This meant that people could no longer see the account or any of its content unless they were Facebook friends with the person who passed away. Starting today, we will maintain the visibility of a person’s content as-is. This will allow people to see memorialized profiles in a manner consistent with the deceased person’s expectations of privacy. We are respecting the choices a person made in life while giving their extended community of family and friends ongoing visibility to the same content they could always see.
The change wasn’t completely out of left field. It arose out of an issue that accompanied the introduction of Look Back videos. A father wanted to see the video for his deceased son, which soon prompted many people to chime in. Kudos, Facebook, for once we think that this is a good plan. Just don’t change anything else for a while, please.
Facebook is changing what happens when you die
