HUFFINGTON
01.20.13
THE VIRTUAL CEMETERY
Since the beginning of the Web,
it’s been plausible that pieces of
information about people with
Web sites and email accounts
would be left accessible after they
died. But the virtual cemetery is
fairly new. One of the oldest online memorials is the U.K.-based
Virtual Memorial Garden, which
began in 1995. A simple, alphabetized collection of tens of thousands of paragraph-long, usersubmitted memories of the dead,
it’s still growing. Since social media first gained mass appeal a decade ago with Friendster (2002)
and MySpace (2003), online profiles have outlived their creators.
But the skyrocketing growth of
Facebook has created a new terrain for death on the Internet.
VIRTUAL MEMORIALS
Dowdell is just one of an estimated 30 million people whose virtual
profiles on Facebook have outlived
them. By the end of this year, 3
million Facebook users’ pages will
have become memorial sites for
their owners, according to calculations by Nate Lustig, the founder
of Entrustet, an online company
that helps people access and delete online accounts after someone
dies. Lustig arrived at the number
“THERE AREN’T REALLY
ANY NORMS AROUND DEATH
AND SOCIAL MEDIA YET.
PEOPLE ARE KIND OF MAKING
IT UP AS THEY GO ALONG.”
by culling data on the total number of Facebook users, their ages
and geographic distribution, and
international death rates.
There are clear rules for how
next of kin can inherit or delete
accounts on Facebook, Twitter,
Instagram and the countless other
online manifestations of ourselves
that have proliferated. Usually,
family members have to submit
an obituary, news article or death
certificate to verify the user is
dead. But unless there’s a request,
the rules on death are rarely enforced on social networks. Facebook allows only the living user of
a registered account to have access to it — families can’t get full
access to profiles unless there’s
documented instruction from the
deceased. In a rare case in June, a
Wisconsin couple obtained a court
order for Facebook to give them
access to the personal messages
in their 23-year-old son’s account