Are the dead taking over Facebook?
journals.sagepub.com
journals.sagepub.com
For a few months, I used her Facebook account to keep in touch with friends and family worldwide about the service, memorials, and the like. At the time, I had quit Facebook myself 3-4 years prior. This was very handy for all of this news dissemination, but then I used Facebook's "memorialize a person" feature to shut down the account for good. This changes the user's name to "Remembering ____ ____", disallows future login or comments on their posts, but leaves all the other content up. I also pulled an archive of everything (especially photos) before doing this.
It's honestly something I very rarely think about, probably mostly because I've disavowed Facebook for years now. But I appreciate that Facebook provided this concrete functionality. I still see her name pop up on other social networks on a regular basis (e.g. you and ____ both know ____).
Hugs to you.
But it does appear that there should be some sort of law/regulation to set the standard for all social media platforms. Whilst physical graves have some legal protection in place about what and what can not be done. Such digital gravestones have no such protection. Maybe that needs a changing. Digital Cemeteries are after all just as important than physical ones and social media platforms come and go (G+).
"like these"... if you said that in almost any other context I wouldn't bat an eye. When it's about access controls to the accounts of dead people, I am utterly baffled at how that will benefit the powerful.
The main reason we don't have proper competition is network effects, and this would be a major way round them. (ideally all social networking websites would be federated using ActivityPub and similar protocols, but this is a minimum).
However, I feel that decentralization should win the marketplace by providing value and making users adopt it willingly.
I hate when things are forced down. There are plenty of alternatives to..., say, Facebook... but many - if not most - people still prefer to use it. So let them do it and please don't force Facebook to change by laws. As a long time IRC user, I hate centralized chat but I respect others' decision to use Slack instead. I want to see decentralization become the norm again naturally. Not forced through evil laws.
Though the prospect of social media networks bidding for your digital soul after death, does bemuse me.
ie: maybe you wanted to get hold of the data for other, bad, purposes. That would be Facebook responsibility for giving you unauthorized access and harming one of their (now gone) users.
Assuming you are her heir (almost always the case), you definitely do have that right.
I hope you don't mind me asking a (maybe quite stupid) question. What if we don't have the account credentials of our loved ones, what would we do in this case? With all that historical data laying around when people pass away, I wonder if there's a standard procedure one can follow to handle those data.
https://www.facebook.com/help/150486848354038
Technically what I did, by having my wife's 1Password account, was not up to their terms. But I was able to use it for a brief period to settle some affairs before I officially memorialized it and that was very helpful.
Nonetheless, it didn't sit well with me (or my brothers) that those not "in the know" would see those posts and not realise that not only was it not my father, but that he was in fact dead.
I feel like society is very much in uncharted territory here.
Death is complex and people/cultures have all sorts of different feelings on it. I don't want to get text messages from my dead sister or emails from my dead grandfather. It's creepy and weird and unsettling (even if just for that split second or two before you figure out wtf is happening).
Hard pass.
I think I agree that some people would benefit from a chance to this framing. However, I am not sure I agree that everyone will, or that those who prefer not to be reminded (particularly at random and unasked for) are turning up their nose at serendipity, as it were.
For me and perhaps for others, I find set and setting to be very important when remembering the deceased. How, where, and when makes a big difference in how such remembrance makes me feel, and whether it helps with acceptance and closure or not.
I find that intentional, set aside times for grieving rituals-- or celebration rituals, as is sometimes the case-- is the best approach. But being blindsided by loss hurts and profits little.
I think it will be intriguing to see if this new world of interconnectivity and constant reminders of those who are no longer with us will aid or hinder trauma recovery.
Facebook, I think, marks old accounts as memorials. I don't Facebook anymore so I might be remembering that wrong.
Still haven't taken him off my favorites contact list...
Google has a system for sending your account to someone else after a timeout period. I thought it was a great idea until I got to the part where you're given an opportunity to add a message.
Thinking of my kids / wife / family what went form an administrative task got really heavy suddenly... i stopped at that point.
Hi <insert names>, I loved you all very much but I guess I died. Don't worry about me. I set this up before I died so you could get into my accounts and settle things. Enjoy your lives while you can!
Love <me>
I think there's some way to notify Facebook of his death so they can "memorialize" his profile. Then, according to his settings, it will either be deleted or converted into a memorial managed by some contact he elected.
I will check this account, thank you!
Society has been in uncharted territory since humans existed. It's not 'more uncharted' because the dangers we face are social media and climate change rather than plague and poor sanitation.
Brings a tear to my eye every time I see it because it reminds me how things change.
There is no way for me to tell Facebook to ban the profile no matter what I tried. I see the same issue on Instagram for very specific issues you cannot report profiles. I even wrote in a textbox "this person is dead!" and Facebook didnt bother. If its an active account its good for business right?
In the case of Instagram a music artist I follow got hacked. The Instagram report system is completely useless in this regard. He is a verified user too. Nothing was done and probably nothing will be done. Active accounts are good for business even if they are hacked or diseased peoples accounts (same thing tbh).
It came up recently that in order to report an imposter account, you have to tag the person who the account is impersonating.
So if that person doesn't have a known account, as is the case with Katie Bouman, there is no in-app mechanism for reporting it. Even when the issue was brought to them directly, Instagram asked what her main account is:
https://twitter.com/oneunderscore__/status/11168119898195107...
The result is that a redpiller with tens of thousands of existing followers from previously impersonating others using the same account is allowed to call himself and operate as the "official" Katie Bouman account. It's a great system.
Put IG back on the spot to make a call.
The artist who was hacked didn't show up on the list because they didn't have the check mark. Instagram should remove that checkmark if your username changes, or even lock down an IG account if a username change is attempted. It's very rare for an artist to change their username.
We have tons of diaries from people in 18th and 19th centuries, and they provide a uniquely intimate glimpse of life in the past.
If there's any upside to our lives being recorded in such great detail, it's that it will be a treasure trove for our descendants long after we're gone.
And our encryption will be so inadequate that everything we want hidden now from governments, et. al. will be readable in the diary sense later.
But I worry that one day they might get lost or destroyed and I wonder if I should scan them all, at least for the sake of having an offsite digital backup for the time being :)
This highlights the biggest difference. Many of the diaries of olden days were written as relatively accurate depictions of actual events. Facebook "diaries" however are the exact opposite. They describe the life that person wished they had.
While you may be able to extract useful information about society overall from this data 100 years from now, it will certainly not say much about an individual's life and those intimate glimpses you would expect.
And to them I say, please don’t judge us too harshly.
People of the future, I wonder what your lives are like. I wonder if you’ve colonized space. I wonder if you’ve entered into other dimensions. I wonder if you can observe into the past. And peer into the future. To be able to guide yourselves into the branch of possible futures that you desire.
It might sound ridiculous but I really do wonder. And I wish the answer was yes and that I got to experience it.
[0]: I'm assuming you can also go the opposite way.
My prediction: If Facebook looses popularity like MySpace: it will hold onto dead people's profiles as long as possible, until it finally goes out of business or its skeleton team of developers makes a critical mistake. Their business at that point will basically be like that of domain squatters. They'll even start sharing things hidden from the public behind privacy settings. If Facebook remains popular, however, it will eventually aggressively purge the profiles of the dead to focus resources on more lucrative monetization opportunities of active consumers.
Honestly, if somehow enough people actually manage to get mad enough at Facebook for it to potentially affect their bottom line, they would likely use Zuckerberg as a scapegoat and ditch him. People like to latch onto a single individual as the problem, so that stunt would probably placate a lot of people [2].
[0]: Even this seems very unlikely given how many deep ties they have into peoples' lives. Keep in mind that it is far from just a social networking tool or blogging platform.
[1]: Hell, they probably have enough money and blackmail data to do whatever they want. Including blackmail.
[2]: Witch hunts are more popular than ever :)
IIRC, Zuckerberg has a controlling stake in Facebook through supervoting shares, so he's not getting ditched unless he wants to be ditched.
I believe he can be removed from his executive role by a court if he's found guilty of a crime (which I believe is likely in the next few years).
I'm not sure about his ownership of the company, but I think a court could order him to transfer supervoting shares as part of a penalty.
But then that begs the question of whether the human individual, Mark Zuckerberg, still owns those shares. They may be in some kind of trust that he can never lose control over.
Celebrity tweets aside, people generally make that sweeping overestimation about the permanence (or at least the public discoverability of) such stuff; as for Facebook itself, users have deleted tons of photos and even their own entire profiles, and typically it's the most interesting (juicy) stuff, e.g. when a girl is going through college and deletes slutty and mischievous pictures of herself from earlier years and parties and relationships.
(Side-note: you spelled "loses" as "looses," one of the most common spelling mistakes.)
But with the current rate at which we are becoming more and more concerned about our privacy, maybe we won't be in a situation where a site like Facebook can actually 'publish' the diaries.
So possibly this information will remain forever locked-up, until some law forces us to delete this data, and it will be gone forever.
It's easy to look back in the past and see the errors of our ancestors, but I don't know if there's a precedent for looking back and feeling completely unimpressed and underwhelmed. Which is how I imagine our descendants will feel.
Survivorship bias. We only talk about the interesting things, regardless of whether it was recorded or not. Many decades had absolutely nothing of note[0] happen.
[0]: At least nothing of note to people today.
Do you care? What makes you think future generations will care about yours?
In the future, there could be actual history classes where students have to trace their own family and read the words of their ancestors.
We already have so much information about the past that we need historians to curate and organise it, and present us with the interesting and relevant fragments in a coherent fashion; otherwise, we're just drowning in data. It's only going to get worse.
For my history degree I actually read a book on ridiculous medieval history - it was an example of history books done wrong (blended dates together, didn't look at historical context), but it's absolutely out there.
And then there's history, which includes the study of 1913.
And period movies and series and comics and so on...
Storage is really, really cheap these days. Cheap enough that you can host Wikipedia and OpenStreetMaps in your garage if you wanted to. And this is before you even get to stuff like Amazon Glacier, for data that you don't know what to do with today, but which might be mineable tomorrow.
I fully expect that any shred of personal information, down to comments, is going to be recorded somewhere. Not necessarily with public access, though, and almost certainly not to the public benefit.
That's odd. I see it brought up on HN quite frequently. And, frankly, I feel like the implicit tone is always that this data needs to be preserved to allow for the insights of future historians.
Personally, I sit on the opposite side of that fence. The inquisition of future historians does not hold weight against the privacy and well-being of the now-living.
I frequent my local Goodwill, once a week. In the book section, there are always multiple school yearbooks. High school, university, middle school. Some very old (university in the 20's). I always take one on my way out. I like looking at the messages people wrote on the inside, and their signature, and then find their yearbook portrait to see what they looked like and what activities they did.
I don't know why this gives me pleasure, but it does for some reason.
What do I do with this growing pile of stranger's yearbooks in my closet? Well, that's a problem I'l deal with eventually...
But then there's the retrieval problem. I'm very interested in family history and genealogy. Every journal, every photo from even a couple generations back is like a priceless treasure. 100 years from now? Our great-grandkids' grandkids will have more data on us than they'll know what to do with.
One of my long term projects I'd like to help tackle is to answer the question "How do you summarize a life?". I like to imagine a system similar to Superman's ice castle where you insert a digital artifact from your ancestor and an AI helps you sift through their data.
You don't need to preserve the machine. You just need to be able to emulate it sufficiently close on then-current hardware. The nice thing about this approach is that if it's done right, then it scales more or less indefinitely, since you can run emulators inside other emulators. So long as at any given point we have one that covers the previous generation...
This takes care of file formats and software. Maintaining compatibility with the physical medium on which data is archived is trickier, because you can't emulate the reader. But on the other hand, with digital data, you can just copy it over to the new medium. So, again, as long as the archives are regularly updated to keep up with the tech - not even current, just whatever is still available - we're good.
Today is the 2 year anniversary of my father's passing. I logged into his FB account a few months after he died and my sister, who was online, saw a login notification and messaged "hello?". I quickly explained that it was me (I was given responsbility for organizing my father's digital assets post-mortem), and instead of being weirded out, she said it was comforting to be messaging with Dad's account and asked to chat for a while (we don't normally communicate much).
Slightly off-topic, but a couple related issues I've had that might be useful for others:
1. Recently someone impersonated my Dad on FB and starting messaging other family members. We were able to very quickly shut it down using FB's tools to flag impersonating accounts - although it felt particularly offensive to have someone impersonate your dead father for unknown, and likely unsavoury, purposes.
2. My dad's main email used a well-known email service that I won't name here but which also has a reputation for relatively poor spam filtering. Going through the incessant 100+ unfiltered daily spam emails from FB, Linkedin, Twitter, bank, airlines, tickets, everywhere he ever shopped, "Don't miss this!" etc in his Inbox made me realize that current screen-attention-capture economy is particularly ill-suited for the declining faculties of older adults. My Dad had early onset dementia and eventually lost the ability to use his email shortly before he passed, but I'd say his experience with the "Internet" in the few years before his passing was made significantly worse through overbearing ads and spam which in retrospect likely took hours of his day to go through as he became less and less able to exert his own agency to avoid. Definitely a regret that I didn't realize this at the time and set up a better system for him, tuned to his age/declining abilities.
3. It's hard to let go, at least for me, and I also found comfort in my Dad's digital leftovers...the idea that I was looking at representations of bits that were flipped because of him, even if trivial, stored all around the world. The best one was end of last year when that Breach Compilation password dump was released...I did a quick query for my Dad's email address and up popped his old password (since changed!) which was a very unique and meaningful word in our family. That made me smile.
Yep, every company’s customer/user base will die in 80 years if they don’t grow at all.
In an extreme example, assuming every human ever born had a Facebook account there would be ~105B "memorial profiles" compared to ~7.5B "active users". Or, about 93% of accounts would belong to the dead.
I often get notifications asking me to "Congratulate ___ on completing 3 years at ___" when I know that the person has passed away.
From their terms of service: “We also provide information and content to research partners and academics to conduct research that advances scholarship and innovation that supports our business or mission and enhances discovery and innovation on topics of general social welfare, technological advancement, public interest, health and well-being.”
For those who so choose, I'd prefer to see options: 1. Person can set who gets to see their content after they pass, before they pass away. A part of their will. 2. People having access to the content of the person who has passed have ways to handle that as they wish. (Never see it, only see it when I ask etc.)
For those who choose not to prepare in advance, they might get the default, which they can change.
So for example, say I post a political, religious or otherwise controversial topic that says something about what used to be core values in the USA or something. Maybe I feel there's some fresh insight, or a way of connecting with people who don't agree with me so we can find common ground. 9 times out of 10, the same handful of people I expect to disagree with, respond and say the same thing I expected them to say.
In other words, I could have written the troll bot that would respond with what they say. It's a mathematical way of saying that their comments are precomputable, rather than coming from what we might consider free will.
Maybe I'm looking at this the wrong way? Maybe I'm the zombie, maybe we're all zombies, I dunno :-)
Now that I think of it, it would be an interesting hobby to build a virtual you that does things on Facebook.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/205395171984254...
https://jacquesmattheij.com/deadbook-the-long-term-facebook/
What happens if such social platforms pass away, which can happen as the case with Google+.
Whilst we have charitable institutions and individuals who try and preserve this part of history in all it's yearly nuances, much goes and passed by (usenet archives) to the extent that sometimes such archives pass away.
Maybe now is the time to push a law that makes any social media platform solidify how they handle such digital gravestones, respecting family wishes. I appreciate many have on their own back organically have various forms of progress upon this. But nothing makes them accountable, no standard, law that preserves such gravestones of the digital age.
While the aggregate opinions of the dead, while alive, might provide context for people yet to be born, let the individuals Rest In Peace, slowly to be forgotten. We don’t need to keep these profiles around for eternity (for one, that will get expensive). Beyond an interesting point at some family reunion, they won’t matter in any material way.
I'd expect a lot in both cases. The first is part of ongoing conversations in society. The second, well... An AI historian or at the very least an AI-assisted historian will likely be the one reading it all, and it'll be extremely interested to get the precise pulse of what went on in people's minds in our day and time.
Contrast this with, say, 200 years ago. We have diaries, letters, newspapers, pamphlets, books, etc. But the data is spotty, and won't allow you to comb through what went on in a typical person's mind. Data from Facebook, Google, Amazon, and so forth allows to do just that for better or worse.
The real problem with this, besides the privacy considerations for as long as we and whoever we interacted with live, is the risk that the data is lost in some way or another before historians get to analyze it. 50 years from now we'll either be in a historian's utopia (ubiquitous data) or in a modern day regression into the dark ages (with much less data than before everything became digital).
Potentially quite interesting. A lot of older people alive today will disavow any connection with imperialist regimes of the mid to late 20th century. They're likely not all telling the truth. Understanding how attitudes then evolved over time may well help us avoid the same mistakes in the future.
My guess is that this will need a new kind of archeology. Much like the postings, a lot of the research will be automated.