My wife passed away early (36) three years ago today.
For a few months, I used her Facebook account to keep in touch with friends and family worldwide about the service, memorials, and the like. At the time, I had quit Facebook myself 3-4 years prior. This was very handy for all of this news dissemination, but then I used Facebook's "memorialize a person" feature to shut down the account for good. This changes the user's name to "Remembering ____ ____", disallows future login or comments on their posts, but leaves all the other content up. I also pulled an archive of everything (especially photos) before doing this.
It's honestly something I very rarely think about, probably mostly because I've disavowed Facebook for years now. But I appreciate that Facebook provided this concrete functionality. I still see her name pop up on other social networks on a regular basis (e.g. you and ____ both know ____).
I did this with my wife's account after she passed just over a year ago. Unfortunately, I didn't think to have Facebook make an archive before I did. They won't let you do so without a court order once the account is memorialized, which means all her photos (from over 9 years of account activity) are stuck there.
It is reassuring that Facebook have some procedures, but these are ones of their own making and nothing to stop that changing (though I doubt that).
But it does appear that there should be some sort of law/regulation to set the standard for all social media platforms. Whilst physical graves have some legal protection in place about what and what can not be done. Such digital gravestones have no such protection. Maybe that needs a changing. Digital Cemeteries are after all just as important than physical ones and social media platforms come and go (G+).
> Regulations like these only work out for the powerful.
"like these"... if you said that in almost any other context I wouldn't bat an eye. When it's about access controls to the accounts of dead people, I am utterly baffled at how that will benefit the powerful.
It is harder for small teams (or even single persons) running small forums to comply with different regulations than it is for a big company. There was a story recently about a guy who was running some specialized forum but decided to shut it down after he started receiving GDPR requests.
Do you actually think it would be an unreasonable burden on a small business to have to remove a dead person from a marketing database when requested to by their family?
It becomes an unreasonable burden when you have dozens or hundreds of small burdens/regulations that aren't unreasonable on their own, but collectively steal a significant amount of time from small businesses trying to balance developing something new and growing with complying with every little regulation they may or may not even know about.
Having to remove a dead person from a marketing database when requested to by their family is never an unreasonable burden, it is somewhat shameful that there is even a need to remind people of that. Following regulations requiring this should not require any extra effort because it is something you should already be doing.
While I agree with you, the argument is that adding regulations over hundreds of "little things you should already be doing" is the kind of regulation that hurts small businesses / sole developers that want to focus on developing and growing new products.
Want real competition in social networks? The regulation needed is for all sites with user-generaled content to be required to allow other sites to re-use any public user-generated content, without and legal or technical obstacles.
The main reason we don't have proper competition is network effects, and this would be a major way round them.
(ideally all social networking websites would be federated using ActivityPub and similar protocols, but this is a minimum).
I am all for decentralization. Heck, I am even working on a business idea that involves it as a core part of the business.
However, I feel that decentralization should win the marketplace by providing value and making users adopt it willingly.
I hate when things are forced down. There are plenty of alternatives to..., say, Facebook... but many - if not most - people still prefer to use it. So let them do it and please don't force Facebook to change by laws. As a long time IRC user, I hate centralized chat but I respect others' decision to use Slack instead. I want to see decentralization become the norm again naturally. Not forced through evil laws.
I'm not certain but I don't think you have the right to download the content of your wife without her permission. It makes sense for Facebook to ask you to go to court to as she is deceased and can't make this decision.
ie: maybe you wanted to get hold of the data for other, bad, purposes. That would be Facebook responsibility for giving you unauthorized access and harming one of their (now gone) users.
I'm very sorry to hear that, I hope you're doing well now.
I hope you don't mind me asking a (maybe quite stupid) question. What if we don't have the account credentials of our loved ones, what would we do in this case? With all that historical data laying around when people pass away, I wonder if there's a standard procedure one can follow to handle those data.
Technically what I did, by having my wife's 1Password account, was not up to their terms. But I was able to use it for a brief period to settle some affairs before I officially memorialized it and that was very helpful.
My father passed away a couple of years ago. It was the kind of awkward conversation I never imagined having whereby I had to kindly ask my step-mother to please stop using my deceased father's Facebook account. Granted, I get on extremely well with my step-mother and I've no doubt she meant well - it's quite likely she wanted to continue to use the account as way to remain connected with my father.
Nonetheless, it didn't sit well with me (or my brothers) that those not "in the know" would see those posts and not realise that not only was it not my father, but that he was in fact dead.
I feel like society is very much in uncharted territory here.
After my dad passed away, getting a Skype popup "<dad> is available" was heartbreaking. My mum switched his laptop on, I had to make sure his accounts wouldn't appear as available after that.
The UI certainly is often poor, particularly in the FaceTime case, but as a general matter, being reminded of a late loved one gives random opportunities to remember, reminisce, and to speak of the departed to children and newer acquaintances, which honors their legacy.
I think that your heart is in the right place with this comment, but you seem to be suggesting that this is the (only) right way to relate to death: to interpret reminders of the deceased as positive opportunities to remember with love.
I think I agree that some people would benefit from a chance to this framing. However, I am not sure I agree that everyone will, or that those who prefer not to be reminded (particularly at random and unasked for) are turning up their nose at serendipity, as it were.
For me and perhaps for others, I find set and setting to be very important when remembering the deceased. How, where, and when makes a big difference in how such remembrance makes me feel, and whether it helps with acceptance and closure or not.
I find that intentional, set aside times for grieving rituals-- or celebration rituals, as is sometimes the case-- is the best approach. But being blindsided by loss hurts and profits little.
The avatars the various communication channels use online for their users stand in for the actual user an its actions. If they keep on acting after someone has deceased it’s weird to see. I’ve experienced it with my dad’s Skype account. I can’t see how that would be different for anybody in practice.
That's one take, but I can't agree with that. For one thing, what if it isn't a legacy you want to honor? Seeing comments from your dead abuser's account on facebook isn't something most people want.
Death is complex and people/cultures have all sorts of different feelings on it. I don't want to get text messages from my dead sister or emails from my dead grandfather. It's creepy and weird and unsettling (even if just for that split second or two before you figure out wtf is happening).
I lost my brother-in-law a few years ago, and it was awkward and painful to continue seeing his name in places like Steam [You both play this game] and other media. I had a damn near heart attack when my father-in-law turned on his computer to collect some things before putting it away, and he auto-signed-in to every service we both used.
I think it will be intriguing to see if this new world of interconnectivity and constant reminders of those who are no longer with us will aid or hinder trauma recovery.
My dad died of a heart attack in January, 2018, and yet here he is on Google Street View, spotting the car driving by. I check back frequently to see if he's still depicted at his address. And of course, I've saved my own copy https://goo.gl/maps/8R9Hm4B3VmNbKRLq7
Maybe you want to know that if you click on the clock on the top left you can go back in time, so should you lose your copy you can get it again (or from anywhere).
I do the same thing with a street view of my childhood home (since been sold to new owners) that still has me and my sisters' cars on the street from visiting my parents for the holidays in 2011.
Brings a tear to my eye every time I see it because it reminds me how things change.
I had a colleague and good friend who died in an accident - he was still logged into one Linux server which I made a point of not rebooting for as long as possible.... (it was an actual physical server in a co-location space).
Re: not rebooting for as long as possible. There was one mainframe at my old school that was finally decommissioned. The admins found a print job that had been waiting there for over 20 years.
Still haven't taken him off my favorites contact list...
Google has a system for sending your account to someone else after a timeout period. I thought it was a great idea until I got to the part where you're given an opportunity to add a message.
Thinking of my kids / wife / family what went form an administrative task got really heavy suddenly... i stopped at that point.
You could copy my sorry but I'm dead message, it really is like this:
Hi <insert names>, I loved you all very much but I guess I died. Don't worry about me. I set this up before I died so you could get into my accounts and settle things. Enjoy your lives while you can!
An old high school friend of mine died a few years back and I am still getting birthday notifications on Facebook. His profile just sits in limbo, a record of his activities the last few weeks before he died.
> His profile just sits in limbo, a record of his activities the last few weeks before he died.
I think there's some way to notify Facebook of his death so they can "memorialize" his profile. Then, according to his settings, it will either be deleted or converted into a memorial managed by some contact he elected.
Same for me. I contacted Facebook about this and they asked for a family member and a death certificate. My friend's family mostly are illiterate and from a small village, so I asked FB if a news clipping(of accident) and obituary from local newspaper would do, they refused. After some communication, I left it. I have since left Facebook but other mutual friends say they still receive his birthday notifications every year.
On a google maps nostalga lane trip I found ability to rewind time to the quaint old paint job on my deceased grandparents house. Brought back some good memories running around as a kid.
My younger brother (deceased now 10 years) is still one of my LinkedIn contacts. It's not so bad as other platforms since I don't interact with LinkedIn much but it hurt a great deal at first and LinkedIn had no mechanism to retire or close his profile.
FWIW, they do now. I just recently closed my younger brother's account (he died four years ago). They have a form for it, you say who you are, what your relationship is, and they ask for a link to an obituary. Then they delete the account.
Facebook, I think, marks old accounts as memorials. I don't Facebook anymore so I might be remembering that wrong.
> I feel like society is very much in uncharted territory here
Society has been in uncharted territory since humans existed. It's not 'more uncharted' because the dangers we face are social media and climate change rather than plague and poor sanitation.
You seem to feel confrontational about this, and I'm not clear why. Pointing out that no one's had to deal with these specific issues before is not anti-progress or anti-technology.
Worse yet a relative of mine passed away almost 10 years ago due to an accident. His "other family" decided to take over his account. They used it to spam insults towards someone who was there during the accident and threw blame for the death. It was disgraceful.
There is no way for me to tell Facebook to ban the profile no matter what I tried. I see the same issue on Instagram for very specific issues you cannot report profiles. I even wrote in a textbox "this person is dead!" and Facebook didnt bother. If its an active account its good for business right?
In the case of Instagram a music artist I follow got hacked. The Instagram report system is completely useless in this regard. He is a verified user too. Nothing was done and probably nothing will be done. Active accounts are good for business even if they are hacked or diseased peoples accounts (same thing tbh).
> I see the same issue on Instagram for very specific issues you cannot report profiles.
It came up recently that in order to report an imposter account, you have to tag the person who the account is impersonating.
So if that person doesn't have a known account, as is the case with Katie Bouman, there is no in-app mechanism for reporting it. Even when the issue was brought to them directly, Instagram asked what her main account is:
The result is that a redpiller with tens of thousands of existing followers from previously impersonating others using the same account is allowed to call himself and operate as the "official" Katie Bouman account. It's a great system.
Hmm, if IG allows an impersonation account as long as no "official" account exists, you could try creating a second impersonation account and claiming it is official in the report of the first impersonation.
The artist who was hacked didn't show up on the list because they didn't have the check mark. Instagram should remove that checkmark if your username changes, or even lock down an IG account if a username change is attempted. It's very rare for an artist to change their username.
Back when I was in high school, nearly a decade ago, a classmate died and her friends were careful to not report it to Facebook because they wanted her account to stay active. At that time it seemed like Facebook had a policy of sunsetting accounts after a mourning period where the family could get the data off it. Is that not a policy anymore?
Nah, my best friend died 5 years ago, his FB account is still up. I suppose it's possible that everyone posting on his wall when his birthday hits each year might reset some counter, though.
One thing I find fascinating, and have not seen discussed, is what will happen to all this data in, say, a couple hundred years.
We have tons of diaries from people in 18th and 19th centuries, and they provide a uniquely intimate glimpse of life in the past.
If there's any upside to our lives being recorded in such great detail, it's that it will be a treasure trove for our descendants long after we're gone.
> One thing I find fascinating, and have not seen discussed, is what will happen to all this data in, say, a couple hundred years.
My prediction: If Facebook looses popularity like MySpace: it will hold onto dead people's profiles as long as possible, until it finally goes out of business or its skeleton team of developers makes a critical mistake. Their business at that point will basically be like that of domain squatters. They'll even start sharing things hidden from the public behind privacy settings. If Facebook remains popular, however, it will eventually aggressively purge the profiles of the dead to focus resources on more lucrative monetization opportunities of active consumers.
Even if Facebook-the-product dies[0], Facebook-the-company will continue to be around for a looong time. Even if they fall out of public favor, they have enough money, enough data, enough business connections, etc. to continue for a very long time [1].
Honestly, if somehow enough people actually manage to get mad enough at Facebook for it to potentially affect their bottom line, they would likely use Zuckerberg as a scapegoat and ditch him. People like to latch onto a single individual as the problem, so that stunt would probably placate a lot of people [2].
[0]: Even this seems very unlikely given how many deep ties they have into peoples' lives. Keep in mind that it is far from just a social networking tool or blogging platform.
[1]: Hell, they probably have enough money and blackmail data to do whatever they want. Including blackmail.
> so he's not getting ditched unless he wants to be ditched
I believe he can be removed from his executive role by a court if he's found guilty of a crime (which I believe is likely in the next few years).
I'm not sure about his ownership of the company, but I think a court could order him to transfer supervoting shares as part of a penalty.
But then that begs the question of whether the human individual, Mark Zuckerberg, still owns those shares. They may be in some kind of trust that he can never lose control over.
I had it as a footnote because I meant it to pertain to a more broad group of people than rich white men.
My point wasn't to make a snide remark like "oh everyone gets mad at the poor CEOs". My point was that crowds seem to enjoy watching public displays of punishment. With the internet, this only gets amplified.
As far as being "as sensitive as using 'Auschwitz'", I was/am not aware of any narrow set of events or group of people that were "systematically murdered" under the term "witch hunt" [0]. Granted, I only did a cursory check.
The term is generally accepted as a category of attack, as opposed to referencing a singular event (such as the Holocaust). From the Wikipedia page:
"In current language, "witch-hunt" metaphorically means an investigation usually conducted with much publicity, supposedly to uncover subversive activity, disloyalty and so on, but really to weaken political opposition."
[0]: I will concede that, yes, people were actually gruesomely murdered under the guise of being witches, which might be enough to refrain from using the term for something that is not murder, but I'd hardly call murdering anybody you don't like "systematic".
Thank you for this gracious response. I recognize that the term's colloquial use is far broader than I implied. Frankly, I think it's a gross mischaracterization of events, and erases real history to use it that way.
As for the "systemic" nature of historic witch-hunts, fruitful research efforts would uncover "Malleus Maleficarum", the textbook for engaging in witch-hunting. I believe the continent-wide application of a uniform methodology—especially when funded by the preeminent institutional authority—qualifies as systematic.
Sections of "Witches, Midwives, and Nurses" by Dierdre English and Barbara Ehrenreich explain its historical use. Their research reveals with-hunts to have been a far cry from "murdering anybody you don't like."
MySpace is holding on to users' profiles? When was the last time you went to a Myspace page? There might still be an active page with that user's name, but several years ago, there was a massive MySpace re-design and overhaul that totally wiped out (at least from public view) HTML customizations of profiles (which MySpace became famous for), embedded music widgets, the entire "About Me" sidebar on the left (where people listed all their favorite stuff, and personal info), the comments (in the comment sidebar that was on the right), blog posts (in the blog section), and countless photos and photo albums, seemingly just saving the profile picture and then some photos that were NOT put into albums. I know that because I went back to a list of MySpace links I had bookmarked from 2006 to 2009 and they are just about all useless.
Celebrity tweets aside, people generally make that sweeping overestimation about the permanence (or at least the public discoverability of) such stuff; as for Facebook itself, users have deleted tons of photos and even their own entire profiles, and typically it's the most interesting (juicy) stuff, e.g. when a girl is going through college and deletes slutty and mischievous pictures of herself from earlier years and parties and relationships.
(Side-note: you spelled "loses" as "looses," one of the most common spelling mistakes.)
There will be so much of it that it will just sound like noise to them. They'll probably have software that mines through petabytes of shitposts to find specific things but I doubt they will be impressed with any of us, even the most prescient or famous ones. Their software will classify the sentiment into canned personality types similar to INTJ, but redefined for internet personas. Nobody will read it manually because we're all just another permutation of "INT...Whatever" like the other 18 million people who posted the same ideas/emotions/sentiment. Kinda sad.
some people are interested in the noise. someone will be interested. interested in you specifically? unlikely. but interested in the mundane lives of long-dead strangers? for sure.
I frequent my local Goodwill, once a week. In the book section, there are always multiple school yearbooks. High school, university, middle school. Some very old (university in the 20's). I always take one on my way out. I like looking at the messages people wrote on the inside, and their signature, and then find their yearbook portrait to see what they looked like and what activities they did.
I don't know why this gives me pleasure, but it does for some reason.
What do I do with this growing pile of stranger's yearbooks in my closet? Well, that's a problem I'l deal with eventually...
> One thing I find fascinating, and have not seen discussed, is what will happen to all this data in, say, a couple hundred years.
That's odd. I see it brought up on HN quite frequently. And, frankly, I feel like the implicit tone is always that this data needs to be preserved to allow for the insights of future historians.
Personally, I sit on the opposite side of that fence. The inquisition of future historians does not hold weight against the privacy and well-being of the now-living.
Are people not writing in physical diaries to prevent future breeches of privacy? (Odd to think of Facebook etc. like that.) Or are people doing it out of convenience / least resistance? If so, are they cognizant of what this means for the longevity of the data? I'm not sure the future impact is an intentional choice...
> If there's any upside to our lives being recorded in such great detail, it's that it will be a treasure trove for our descendants long after we're gone.
And to them I say, please don’t judge us too harshly.
People of the future, I wonder what your lives are like. I wonder if you’ve colonized space. I wonder if you’ve entered into other dimensions. I wonder if you can observe into the past. And peer into the future. To be able to guide yourselves into the branch of possible futures that you desire.
It might sound ridiculous but I really do wonder. And I wish the answer was yes and that I got to experience it.
And then you start thinking, "what even is this desire I feel for these future possibilities? Where does that come from and why is it so?" Will people in the future even share our current preferences? What happens to us when science advances to the point that we can hack our own reward functions (preferences)?
Digital data is more volatile then you think, unless actively archived a lot of it will just disappear when Facebook goes out of business. Look what happened with Myspace and what they deleted...
I suspect that a lot of Myspace content was scrapped, and is floating around in databases to this day.
Storage is really, really cheap these days. Cheap enough that you can host Wikipedia and OpenStreetMaps in your garage if you wanted to. And this is before you even get to stuff like Amazon Glacier, for data that you don't know what to do with today, but which might be mineable tomorrow.
I fully expect that any shred of personal information, down to comments, is going to be recorded somewhere. Not necessarily with public access, though, and almost certainly not to the public benefit.
None, but if I knew that my great great grandfather/grandmother made a joke in 1913, I'd want to read it. You forget that we'll likely be able to identify lineage if we manage to retain this data.
In the future, there could be actual history classes where students have to trace their own family and read the words of their ancestors.
I can't imagine wanting to spend the time to trawl through inane trivia from generations of my ancestors. Just because there's a genetic link between me and my great-great-grandfather, it doesn't follow that he was an interesting person.
We already have so much information about the past that we need historians to curate and organise it, and present us with the interesting and relevant fragments in a coherent fashion; otherwise, we're just drowning in data. It's only going to get worse.
I could see it becoming something like "dancing plague"--an odd bit of trivia that won't come up except among people who are looking at early 21st century trivia facts.
How many articles from history journals have you read? I'm not saying this will be common, but someone will definitely look at it at some point.
For my history degree I actually read a book on ridiculous medieval history - it was an example of history books done wrong (blended dates together, didn't look at historical context), but it's absolutely out there.
You joke, but I honestly cannot imagine how our future generations will perceive us if they can look back and see that type of thing.
It's easy to look back in the past and see the errors of our ancestors, but I don't know if there's a precedent for looking back and feeling completely unimpressed and underwhelmed. Which is how I imagine our descendants will feel.
Well one possibility is that they will be dealing with even wierder shit than Tide Pods (imagine the horrific possibilities of advanced virtual reality sims). Our current "errors" may seem mild by comparison.
Or just that all this BS will be lost, when FB goes out of fashion, and be as relevant and accessible to future generations as AOL, MySpace, or old USENET threads are to us...
> I don't know if there's a precedent for looking back and feeling completely unimpressed and underwhelmed
Survivorship bias. We only talk about the interesting things, regardless of whether it was recorded or not. Many decades had absolutely nothing of note[0] happen.
Assuming the hard drives survive and someone can read them. The advantage of paper is that you just have to understand the language. Digital archives require a lot of technology to read, even before you get to the point of understanding the language.
Yeah there's definitely a chance that it won't survive. In which case the opposite conclusion is equally interesting, since this period would be an uncharacteristically Dark Age, with very little written paper to store as its memory. No one writes diaries anymore.
I'd guess that there are still orders of magnitudes more paper diaries, newspapers and other records around than a few hundred years ago. General literacy is a very recent thing.
I mean we do that with dead languages... We piece them together given related langugages and clues in the grammar. I'm sure we can turn zeros and ones back into something readable...
And our encryption will be so inadequate that everything we want hidden now from governments, et. al. will be readable in the diary sense later.
But I worry that one day they might get lost or destroyed and I wonder if I should scan them all, at least for the sake of having an offsite digital backup for the time being :)
I think about this a lot. There's the obvious archival problem, to ensure the data is preserved along with a machine to read it or instructions on how to build such a machine.
But then there's the retrieval problem. I'm very interested in family history and genealogy. Every journal, every photo from even a couple generations back is like a priceless treasure. 100 years from now? Our great-grandkids' grandkids will have more data on us than they'll know what to do with.
One of my long term projects I'd like to help tackle is to answer the question "How do you summarize a life?". I like to imagine a system similar to Superman's ice castle where you insert a digital artifact from your ancestor and an AI helps you sift through their data.
> to ensure the data is preserved along with a machine to read it or instructions on how to build such a machine
You don't need to preserve the machine. You just need to be able to emulate it sufficiently close on then-current hardware. The nice thing about this approach is that if it's done right, then it scales more or less indefinitely, since you can run emulators inside other emulators. So long as at any given point we have one that covers the previous generation...
This takes care of file formats and software. Maintaining compatibility with the physical medium on which data is archived is trickier, because you can't emulate the reader. But on the other hand, with digital data, you can just copy it over to the new medium. So, again, as long as the archives are regularly updated to keep up with the tech - not even current, just whatever is still available - we're good.
But with the current rate at which we are becoming more and more concerned about our privacy, maybe we won't be in a situation where a site like Facebook can actually 'publish' the diaries.
So possibly this information will remain forever locked-up, until some law forces us to delete this data, and it will be gone forever.
I made a similar comment on HN last week and was downvoted, for reasons I can't fathom. I agree, it would be a valuable trove of info, an "objective history."
> provide a uniquely intimate glimpse of life in the past.
This highlights the biggest difference. Many of the diaries of olden days were written as relatively accurate depictions of actual events. Facebook "diaries" however are the exact opposite. They describe the life that person wished they had.
While you may be able to extract useful information about society overall from this data 100 years from now, it will certainly not say much about an individual's life and those intimate glimpses you would expect.
Today is the 2 year anniversary of my father's passing. I logged into his FB account a few months after he died and my sister, who was online, saw a login notification and messaged "hello?". I quickly explained that it was me (I was given responsbility for organizing my father's digital assets post-mortem), and instead of being weirded out, she said it was comforting to be messaging with Dad's account and asked to chat for a while (we don't normally communicate much).
Slightly off-topic, but a couple related issues I've had that might be useful for others:
1. Recently someone impersonated my Dad on FB and starting messaging other family members. We were able to very quickly shut it down using FB's tools to flag impersonating accounts - although it felt particularly offensive to have someone impersonate your dead father for unknown, and likely unsavoury, purposes.
2. My dad's main email used a well-known email service that I won't name here but which also has a reputation for relatively poor spam filtering. Going through the incessant 100+ unfiltered daily spam emails from FB, Linkedin, Twitter, bank, airlines, tickets, everywhere he ever shopped, "Don't miss this!" etc in his Inbox made me realize that current screen-attention-capture economy is particularly ill-suited for the declining faculties of older adults. My Dad had early onset dementia and eventually lost the ability to use his email shortly before he passed, but I'd say his experience with the "Internet" in the few years before his passing was made significantly worse through overbearing ads and spam which in retrospect likely took hours of his day to go through as he became less and less able to exert his own agency to avoid. Definitely a regret that I didn't realize this at the time and set up a better system for him, tuned to his age/declining abilities.
3. It's hard to let go, at least for me, and I also found comfort in my Dad's digital leftovers...the idea that I was looking at representations of bits that were flipped because of him, even if trivial, stored all around the world. The best one was end of last year when that Breach Compilation password dump was released...I did a quick query for my Dad's email address and up popped his old password (since changed!) which was a very unique and meaningful word in our family. That made me smile.
A co-worker of mine (lead architect) passed away a few months ago and his messages still show up frequently in Slack history searches and git blames. Feels weird that I could still DM the account.
The kids I know are, for now, skipping Facebook proper (for IG, etc.). If user inflow ends up less than the death rate, it's somewhat inevitable that the dead take over.
I had a Facebook friend who died, of cancer. For the next several months I continued to receive product recommendations and other "activity" notifications "from" her. At that point I decided Facebook was a dehumanizing platform and quit.
A friend died and after a few years his twitter account started occasionally posting spam. I made a joke to his sister that he was trying to contact us from beyond via twitter spam. She thought that was funny because that totally would be him. But she had to close his account because it was real bothering other people.
If the dead remain on social networks in perpetuity they'll make up a larger and larger % of the user base and actually have a significant statistical impact on the ratio of accounts vs. active users. It would take some sustained high birth rates or a dramatic decrease in death rates to reverse this.
In an extreme example, assuming every human ever born had a Facebook account there would be ~105B "memorial profiles" compared to ~7.5B "active users". Or, about 93% of accounts would belong to the dead.
My question about Facebook data is regarding historical research. If Facebook is around for 100-200 years, is there a point at which my data should no longer be protected and private? Should historians have access to Obama's private Facebook messages in 150 years just like we have Washington or Jefferson's private correspondence?
They can do this now, I’m guessing the key is that is must make them moneyey.
From their terms of service:
“We also provide information and content to research partners and academics to conduct research that advances scholarship and innovation that supports our business or mission and enhances discovery and innovation on topics of general social welfare, technological advancement, public interest, health and well-being.”
There's some talk of regulation, and people who never knew individuals getting in on the act.
For those who so choose, I'd prefer to see options:
1. Person can set who gets to see their content after they pass, before they pass away. A part of their will.
2. People having access to the content of the person who has passed have ways to handle that as they wish. (Never see it, only see it when I ask etc.)
For those who choose not to prepare in advance, they might get the default, which they can change.
Part of the reason I deleted my last quasi-anonymous FB account was the feed page turning into an obituary section with more than a few old friends passing.
I thought this was going to be an article about online zombies, who are alive but act like trolls (is there a word for this?)
So for example, say I post a political, religious or otherwise controversial topic that says something about what used to be core values in the USA or something. Maybe I feel there's some fresh insight, or a way of connecting with people who don't agree with me so we can find common ground. 9 times out of 10, the same handful of people I expect to disagree with, respond and say the same thing I expected them to say.
In other words, I could have written the troll bot that would respond with what they say. It's a mathematical way of saying that their comments are precomputable, rather than coming from what we might consider free will.
Maybe I'm looking at this the wrong way? Maybe I'm the zombie, maybe we're all zombies, I dunno :-)
Someone recently built a bot that automates being an intsagram thot and sends him emails whenever a business offers the account free meals at restaurants so they just check their email for free stuff and never touch the website. A bot goes around scanning for viral posts to repost and following and unfollowing other users.
Whatever you think of social media, it has become for many a long past good sole, a digital cemetery.
What happens if such social platforms pass away, which can happen as the case with Google+.
Whilst we have charitable institutions and individuals who try and preserve this part of history in all it's yearly nuances, much goes and passed by (usenet archives) to the extent that sometimes such archives pass away.
Maybe now is the time to push a law that makes any social media platform solidify how they handle such digital gravestones, respecting family wishes. I appreciate many have on their own back organically have various forms of progress upon this. But nothing makes them accountable, no standard, law that preserves such gravestones of the digital age.
While historians love to peer into the minutiae of daily lives because, well, historians, how much does knowing Great-great Aunt Ethyll’s thoughts on Karl Marx actually affect us on a daily basis? How much will your predilection for the song stylings of Kim Kardashian affect future generations in a meaningful way?
While the aggregate opinions of the dead, while alive, might provide context for people yet to be born, let the individuals Rest In Peace, slowly to be forgotten. We don’t need to keep these profiles around for eternity (for one, that will get expensive). Beyond an interesting point at some family reunion, they won’t matter in any material way.
There are branches of archeology and paleontology studying ancient feces (look up coprolites and paleofeces,) and deriving a lot of information about ancient societies and animals. So you never know what will be deemed valuable in the future.
My guess is that this will need a new kind of archeology. Much like the postings, a lot of the research will be automated.
> how much does knowing Great-great Aunt Ethyll’s thoughts on Karl Marx actually affect us on a daily basis? How much will your predilection for the song stylings of Kim Kardashian affect future generations in a meaningful way?
I'd expect a lot in both cases. The first is part of ongoing conversations in society. The second, well... An AI historian or at the very least an AI-assisted historian will likely be the one reading it all, and it'll be extremely interested to get the precise pulse of what went on in people's minds in our day and time.
Contrast this with, say, 200 years ago. We have diaries, letters, newspapers, pamphlets, books, etc. But the data is spotty, and won't allow you to comb through what went on in a typical person's mind. Data from Facebook, Google, Amazon, and so forth allows to do just that for better or worse.
The real problem with this, besides the privacy considerations for as long as we and whoever we interacted with live, is the risk that the data is lost in some way or another before historians get to analyze it. 50 years from now we'll either be in a historian's utopia (ubiquitous data) or in a modern day regression into the dark ages (with much less data than before everything became digital).
> While historians love to peer into the minutiae of daily lives because, well, historians, how much does knowing Great-great Aunt Ethyll’s thoughts on Karl Marx actually affect us on a daily basis? How much will your predilection for the song stylings of Kim Kardashian affect future generations in a meaningful way?
Potentially quite interesting. A lot of older people alive today will disavow any connection with imperialist regimes of the mid to late 20th century. They're likely not all telling the truth. Understanding how attitudes then evolved over time may well help us avoid the same mistakes in the future.
Well that's an odd thought. It seems inevitable though unless they suspend accounts that are inactive after a certain period of time. I think facebook is the one that needs to die though
For a few months, I used her Facebook account to keep in touch with friends and family worldwide about the service, memorials, and the like. At the time, I had quit Facebook myself 3-4 years prior. This was very handy for all of this news dissemination, but then I used Facebook's "memorialize a person" feature to shut down the account for good. This changes the user's name to "Remembering ____ ____", disallows future login or comments on their posts, but leaves all the other content up. I also pulled an archive of everything (especially photos) before doing this.
It's honestly something I very rarely think about, probably mostly because I've disavowed Facebook for years now. But I appreciate that Facebook provided this concrete functionality. I still see her name pop up on other social networks on a regular basis (e.g. you and ____ both know ____).