Huffington Magazine Issue 32 | Page 58

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