Have You Designated a Legacy Contact on Facebook?
Source: facebook.com
It isn’t something we typically think about but as our world shifts to digital and as more and more of us leave behind large social media footprints, what happens to those accounts when we die? I have thought about it briefly, mostly in thinking that I should give my passwords to someone, so that, if something happens to me unexpectedly, someone will be able to get onto my social media to let my followers know. I have had social media friends vanish with no explanation, and it’s always haunted me that maybe something happened to them and I had no way of knowing.
Despite the fact that I’m a lawyer, it honestly never occurred to me that what happens to my social media accounts after my death might be governed by their terms of use…until I saw this story reported widely on the local news. There was a recent tragedy in a nearby town that resulted in the unexpected, untimely death of George Heath. George’s widow, Rosemary, was accessing his Facebook account to send photos and videos to family and friends and share older memories. Given how long Facebook has been around now, there are potentially years’ worth of memories built up on Facebook pages, and one could see how they would be of some comfort in a time of grief.
However, Facebook’s terms of use prohibited what Rosemary was doing. Someone notified Facebook that George had died and Facebook basically locked the account down. They call it “memorializing the page,” but the effect of it is that it’s locked and no one can access it, not even someone who has the password. Now, this makes sense in a way: People could do malicious and terrible things to a deceased person’s Facebook page, theoretically, if Facebook didn’t lock it down. But it’s a harsh outcome when applied to people in Rosemary’s situation.
Facebook’s terms of use inform you that you should designate a legacy contact. This was actually difficult for me to find in Facebook’s policies and I eventually only found it by Googling “Facebook memorialized page,” so it’s not like this is very obvious on the website itself. And, anyway, not many of us think a whole lot about our unexpected deaths. And, if we do, not many of us think that we should read our social media terms of use about it. I looked it up, and Twitter also has a policy where you can lock down a Twitter account if the user dies, but Twitter seems to require a lot more proof than Facebook does.
Also of concern to me is that, even if someone is designated as a legacy contact, it still might not allow the kind of access that Rosemary was looking for, or that you might want to grant to someone. Facebook limits what a legacy contact can do, meaning that your power over what happens to your Facebook account really ultimately lies with Facebook, not you or your wishes. Which is a reminder, of course, that our control over our Facebook accounts is limited to begin with and pretty much at the whim of Facebook.
We tend not to read the terms of use of sites, as we all know. And we talk about that a lot in the context of agreeing to arbitration clauses and stuff like that. We don’t often think about how that can have consequences for our loved ones after our deaths. I understand, of course, that Facebook and Twitter don’t want to hand out log-in information, but if the user has given the log-in information to someone else–and, as I could foresee, if the user has given the log-in information to someone specifically for the purpose of managing the social media account if/when they die–it seems odd for Facebook to then react as if that person’s actions are prohibited. On the other hand, I suppose, how would Facebook know otherwise? A conundrum.