Twitter’s Deceased-User Policy

Twitter recently adopted a policy to handle ownership of a deceased user’s account. Twitter requires the following information:

1. Your full name, contact information (including e-mail address), and your relationship to the deceased user. 
2. The username of the Twitter account, or a link to the profile page of the Twitter account. 
3. A link to a public obituary or news article.

Once you provide Twitter with these three things, you can either request that the deceased user’s account be removed entirely or receive an archive of all the deceased user’s tweets offline.

Jeremy Toeman, CEO of Legacy Locker, thinks that this policy lacks the concept of the deceased user’s intent. Instead, Toeman suggests that people use his own service, which allows users to save their log-in information along with instructions regarding each online account.

In comparison, Facebook adopted a policy to handle deceased users’ accounts in October which allows family members to delete the account or memorialize it. Unlike Twitter, a memorialized account stays in Facebook’s system, and other Facebook members can still interact with the deceased member’s wall. Facebook also provides greater privacy and security measures for deceased members’ accounts than Twitter.

See Josh Lowensohn, Twitter’s New Deceased-User Policy vs. Facebook’s, CNET, Aug. 11, 2010.

Special thanks to Gus Fuldner for bringing this to my attention.