HUFFINGTON
01.20.13
THE VIRTUAL CEMETERY
had been in a car crash. He died of
cardiac arrest and liver failure in
that hospital bed.
Aurora immediately deleted his
comment. They hadn’t been very
close, but would meet whenever
Aurora was back in India. Facebook had allowed their bond to
survive. It’s been four months, and
while Aurora misses his friend, he
doesn’t want to think about his
death all the time. He says Facebook is forcing him to.
“…THIS FACEBOOK
GENERATION WILL
HAVE MORE
EXPERIENCES
WITH DEATH THAN
ANY GENERATION.”
“My roommates and I, we have
a lot of mutual friends on Facebook. And it would keep on notifying them that they may ‘know’
Lalit and should add hi m on Facebook,” says Aurora. “My friends
would pull me over and say, ‘Do
you know him?’ He’s expired. It
just doesn’t look nice.”
One of Facebook’s most loved
and loathed elements is the “people you may know” feature. Based
upon your location, university or
workplace and the people one has
friended, Facebook employs a formula to suggest users befriend
people they “may know,” usually
friends of friends. Above a link to
“add friend,” Facebook shows the
name and thumbnail photo of the
suggested friend.
“One of my good pictures with
Lalit, it came up on Facebook and
it asked me to tag and identify this
person. It’s not good. You are tagging him at the wrong time. When
I go through my pictures, I see his
comment. I am forced to click on
his name and look back,” says Aurora. “A Facebook profile is an indication that someone is alive. We
need to respect one’s privacy.”
What to do with dead profiles
is an increasing problem for Facebook. Three years ago, the company
introduced a feature to convert
profiles of dead friends into official
memorial pages to avoid the kinds
of issues Aurora has seen.
“We believe we have put in effective policies that address the
accounts that are left behind by
the deceased,” said Fred Wolens,
a Facebook spokesman. “When we
receive a report that a person on
Facebook is deceased, we put the