Social Networking Post Mortem
Here's what a few online services say about the deceased in their terms of service.
"When we are notified that a user has died, we will generally, but are not obligated to, keep the user's account active under a special memorialized status for a period of time determined by us to allow other users to post and view comments."
Yahoo (Flickr)
"No Right of Survivorship and Non-Transferability. You agree that your Yahoo! account is non-transferable and any rights to your Yahoo! ID or contents within your account terminate upon your death. Upon receipt of a copy of a death certificate, your account may be terminated and all contents therein permanently deleted."
MySpace
MySpace does not have an official policy in their terms of service, but I found the following in a CBS News article. "MySpace said in a statement it handles deceased members' pages on a "case-by-case basis" and does not "allow anyone to assume control of a deceased user's profile." Profiles can be deleted if that's requested by family members."
Twitter, LinkedIn, Google, Brightkite, ClaimID, del.icio.us and Pownce don't seem to have anything formal in their terms. So, in short, they aren't obligated to do anything. My digital identity might live on, or it might not. What is it going to take to bring this issue to the forefront and force the proprietors of the social web to address it? I suppose only time will tell.
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My sister died in April and we still keep up her facebook and myspace profile, her photo will shuffle through my list of friends on facebook, and I bitterly enjoy it. I still email her gmail account. I am thankful things like this don't disappear.
Interesting consideration. I've started keeping a log of my memories in the hope that my 12 year old daughter is more interested in what I have to say when she is, say, thirty, then she does now.
The individual life cycle for the average joe goes something like this: live > die > remembered by family and friends > remembered by some grand children > slowly fade away until someone has an interest in the family tree. Now, imagine if the social sites archived everyone, so in three hundred years, my great-great-great-great, etc. grand daughter wonders about her relatives. Bingo, she pulls my Facebook account.
I regret not recording more (did two) interviews with my mom. Not getting older family members to write down their memories. Perhaps all these social sites will serve as that: a depository for memories.
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