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Comment by dpcx | Hacker News Reader

I did this with my wife's account after she passed just over a year ago. Unfortunately, I didn't think to have Facebook make an archive before I did. They won't let you do so without a court order once the account is memorialized, which means all her photos (from over 9 years of account activity) are stuck there.

Hugs to you.

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It is reassuring that Facebook have some procedures, but these are ones of their own making and nothing to stop that changing (though I doubt that).

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+).

Why regulation? It's working quite well so far. Let the market work things out.

Yes, because there's such a healthy, thriving, competitive market in social networking...?

And the answer to that is regulating? Of course not. Regulations like these only work out for the powerful.

> Regulations like these only work out for the powerful.

"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.

It is harder for small teams (or even single persons) running small forums to comply with different regulations than it is for a big company. There was a story recently about a guy who was running some specialized forum but decided to shut it down after he started receiving GDPR requests.

Do you actually think it would be an unreasonable burden on a small business to have to remove a dead person from a marketing database when requested to by their family?

It becomes an unreasonable burden when you have dozens or hundreds of small burdens/regulations that aren't unreasonable on their own, but collectively steal a significant amount of time from small businesses trying to balance developing something new and growing with complying with every little regulation they may or may not even know about.

Having to remove a dead person from a marketing database when requested to by their family is never an unreasonable burden, it is somewhat shameful that there is even a need to remind people of that. Following regulations requiring this should not require any extra effort because it is something you should already be doing.

While I agree with you, the argument is that adding regulations over hundreds of "little things you should already be doing" is the kind of regulation that hurts small businesses / sole developers that want to focus on developing and growing new products.

Who is it you think lack of regulation works out for then?

Want real competition in social networks? The regulation needed is for all sites with user-generaled content to be required to allow other sites to re-use any public user-generated content, without and legal or technical obstacles.

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).

I am all for decentralization. Heck, I am even working on a business idea that involves it as a core part of the business.

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.

Imagine a person preferring one ad-driven social network to another because of more advanced digital graveyard capabilities.

An interesting thought, probably best left explored by a future episode of Black Mirror.

Though the prospect of social media networks bidding for your digital soul after death, does bemuse me.

I'm not certain but I don't think you have the right to download the content of your wife without her permission. It makes sense for Facebook to ask you to go to court to as she is deceased and can't make this decision.

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.

> I don't think you have the right to download the content of your wife without her permission.

Assuming you are her heir (almost always the case), you definitely do have that right.

I don't know how things work in your country but at least, here, you'll need to go through court to get possession of the property if you are a heir.

I'm very sorry to hear that, I hope you're doing well now.

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.

Facebook seems to take a pretty hard line against giving account access.

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.

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