Facebook Plans to Turn Your Profile into ‘Virtual Grave’ When You Die

Social media giant Facebook is adding a feature to profiles of those who have passed on that will allow guests to their page to leave comments on a “tribute” section. These memorialized profiles will be an electronic memorial for their deceased account holders.

Depending on the privacy settings of a memorialized account, Facebook friends can still write on the wall of its Timeline or comment on any posts the account holder made before they died. Facebook also has “legacy contacts,” which are designated users that can manage the account after the originator has died. Legacy contacts will have the power now to control the tributes section including the ability to decide which other users can see and post tributes, delete posts and tributes, change who can view the page in its entirety, or even change tags of other users.

The ability to change pages into memorial pages started in 2009. The number of Facebook accounts belonging to deceased users continues to grow and will soon outnumber the amount of living users. Facebook has over two billion users but it is thought more than 10,000 of them die everyday.

See Charlotte Edwards, Facebook Plans to Turn Your Profile into ‘Virtual Grave’ When You Die, Fox News, March 6, 2019.