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February 24, 2009
How to Get Your Facebook Profile Removed Once You're Dead (It's Harder than You Think)
When Emmy-award winning investigative journalist William Bemister passed away last November, his sister Stephanie decided to have his Facebook profile removed. You might think such a thing would be simple, but during a time of grief, Facebook makes it as hard as possible for profiles to be removed.
Ms. Bemister sent a copy of her brother's death certificate, but Facebook refused to remove the profile, sending this reply:
"Per our policy for deceased users, we have memorialized this person's account. This removes certain more sensitive information and sets privacy so that only confirmed friends can see the profile or find the person in search. The Wall remains so that friends and family can leave posts in remembrance."
Eventually, Facebook gave the real reason: it was because Ms. Bemister said only that she was a relative and did not inform them she was next of kin.
This certainly doesn't help Facebook's problems with privacy. Just last week, Facebook went through a debacle of returning to a previous version of their Terms of Service after users protested the new one, which they felt took too much control over their content.
In years past, Facebook has faced privacy issues related to advertising when a program used private information to advertise to Facebook members.
Posted by Nathania Johnson on February 24, 2009 11:30 AM
Comments
Stephen February 24, 2009 10:58 PM
Why Facebook makes life so hard for its user? This kind of issue should have been sorted out a long time ago.
Guillaume February 25, 2009 9:29 AM
What about people who may not have any relatives or friends who don't care enough or it hasn't crossed their mind to have a dead friends profile removed. Facebook should build in some sort of safe guard. Say, if a person hasn't logged into their account for, say, six months, it becomes inactive and an email sent (waiting for reactivation by the user) After a year it gets deleted. Simple stuff really. There are women on there still getting votes on how hot they are that have been dead for years. Creepy.