(Social) life after death: Now you can choose your Facebook account’s fate after your demise
Not immortal? You might want to choose a friend to manage your digital remains
It’s hard enough to control the digital trail you leave behind on the Internet every day, but what about after you die? Facebook has taken the initiative to give you a choice for what happens thereafter.
Thanks to the new Legacy Contact feature added to the social networking site today, you can effectively set your last wishes for your Facebook account, determining whether a friend gains access to your profile or if everything public should be permanently deleted.
If you choose the former, the friend can pin a new post atop your timeline, update your profile picture, and interact with any friend requests that come through, however he or she won’t be able to commonly post via your account or flip back through your private messages. Additionally, the Legacy Contact can download a full archive of the content and media you’ve shared publicly.
Facebook says additional options may come to the Legacy Contact programme over time; also, you can currently choose your contact with or without sending an accompanying message about the decision. While the company has honoured requests to memorialize pages from loved ones in the past, this is the first time that users have been able to determine their own pages’ fates in advance.
And if you simply want your digital past to disappear off of Facebook, you can do that too. But if you’re well-connected on the social platform, know that having a modern memorial can be a positive thing for friends and loved ones to stay linked around your former life.
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Andrew Hayward
Freelance Writer 
