Facebook: Life After Death

I have recently come across a rather disturbing idea or mindset, debate, whatever you want to call it. Can Facebook Make Me Immortal?

I was quite shocked yet curious after discovering a story amongst my peers about a father who was unable to delete his daughter’s Facebook page. The father had continued to receive emails regarding his daughter’s Facebook account weeks after she had passed away. After contacting Facebook with regards to deleting her account he was informed that Facebook were unable to do so without the account holder’s permission, once the situation was explained Facebook proceeded to say that an account was never deleted from their archives.

Users discovered that it is nearly impossible to be removed entirely from Facebook setting off concern and controversy among the social networking community. While the Web site offers users the option to deactivate their accounts, Facebook servers keep copies of the information from those accounts indefinitely. Indeed, many users who have contacted Facebook to request that their accounts be deleted have not succeeded in erasing their records from the network.

The technological hurdles set by Facebook have a business rationale: they allow ex-Facebookers who choose to return the ability to resurrect their accounts effortlessly. According to an e-mail, a spokeswoman for Facebook, “Deactivated accounts mean that a user can reactivate at any time and their information will be available again just as they left it.”

But it also means that disenchanted users cannot disappear from the site without leaving footprints. Facebook’s terms of use state that “you may remove your user content from the site at any time,” but also that “you acknowledge that the company may retain archived copies of your user content.”

Facebook’s Web site does not inform departing users that they must delete information from their account in order to close it fully — meaning that they may unwittingly leave anything from e-mail addresses to credit card numbers sitting on Facebook servers.

Only people who contact Facebook’s customer service department are informed that they must painstakingly delete, line by line, all of the profile information, “wall” messages and group memberships they may have created within Facebook.

After finding this out I proceeded to research the matter further and subsequently found forums on the web with people discussing that Facebook meant Life after Death. This, in my opinion is a pretty controversial subject and an odd thing to discuss on a forum and yet there are many places on the net where people a suggesting this same idea. Facebook have recently changed their rules that they will keep a persons profile after they have been informed of their death but will turn it into a memorial site where people are able to leave messages etc commemorating the deceased. So your profile can carry on after you have died but only in the loosest of terms does it make you immortal.