Oh My Tech: What to do if someone you know on Facebook or LinkedIn dies
August 8, 2011 by admin
Filed under Lingerie Events
Have you ever had the experience where you are friends with someone on LinkedIn, and you know they have passed away? I have two LinkedIn connections who are no longer alive. I feel weird about severing the connection, and I also feel like I should do something about it, but then I think to myself that there are people out there much closer to these guys than me, and shouldn’t they be the ones doing something about it? Maybe they don’t want to. What is the plan for this? Do we just linger on social networking forever as if we are still working in our last position, or is someone in charge of either indicating we are deceased or removing our page? I wonder about the etiquette of this. Do you know? Maybe our wills need to include our logins and passwords for all our social networking sites so that our family can either update us as passed along or take us down. — Shauna Bona, Sandy
That’s an interesting situation and one I hope I don’t have to encounter in a long time, if you know what I mean.
But the fact is there are probably plenty of LinkedIn accounts or Facebook pages that belong to users who are now deceased. How that should be dealt with is pretty easy: Let the family decide what to do with them.
Obviously, for LinkedIn, which is a social network specifically for business people, it does less good to have an active account than, say, Facebook.
If a friend passes away whom you are connected to on LinkedIn, you certainly can let a family member know that their deceased relative still has an active account. Because LinkedIn is about business relationships, the family may not know he or she had one.
A LinkedIn representative said if this happens, you can notify them through their website. They then can begin verifying the person’s death and decide if the account needs to be taken down, I suspect by asking the family.
For Facebook, it can be a different decision entirely.
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It’s becoming more of a practice to leave up the person’s Facebook page as a way of communicating memorial services and other information to friends and distant family. Some even leave the page up as a shrine.
A Facebook spokeswoman said that pages can be changed to a “memorial status” if someone dies. “In the Memorial State, certain profile sections and features are hidden from view to protect the privacy of the deceased. For example, recent statuses are removed, groups the person has joined are hidden, and the person’s privacy settings are changed to “Only Friends” so that only his/her Friends can see the Profile,” she said in an email.
Facebook can also remove the page altogether if family requests it and the death has been verified either through an obituary or by Facebook contacting the local municipality, according to the spokeswoman.
What Facebook will not do, even after a death, is give away that person’s login and password to family members. So if the person’s page is something that family wants to keep updated after the death, they will already need to know the login and password.
With social networking becoming such an important part of many people’s lives, it might be wise to leave instructions in your will on how those accounts should be dealt with.
If you have a tech question for Vince, email it to him at ohmytech@sltrib.com, and he might answer it for you in a future column. Also follow him at @ohmytech and on Google+ at +Vincent Horiuchi.
