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Two ideas to improve this: Transparency. If Foo dies and Bar reports them as dead, then inform all of Foo's friends about what Bar did. Foo's friends have a ri

Two ideas to improve this: Transparency. If Foo dies and Bar reports them as dead, then inform all of Foo's friends about what Bar did. Foo's friends have a right to know that Foo has died and that Bar wants Foo's data deleted. In the real world, this is basic human decency. Appeal process. If X number/percent of Foo's friends say that he isn't really dead or that his profile shouldn't have been deleted, then ask all of Foo's friends what to do. Simple vote, majority wins. If someone is still unhappy with the result of this, then they can take it to the real world court system.

ThbTs4wbXC9Qjv 8y ago
Some people don't want all of their friends and family to be notified when they die... so while your transparency idea sounds good in THEORY, I fundamentally disagree with it. Ditto for your appeal process idea. Some people prefer to fade away in silence with dignity (from their point of view). That said, both of your ideas have merit if they are proposed to users as available OPTIONS that can be manually activated/opted into, but I would hope they never make them the default behavior. Losing someone close is hard enough without turning it into some democratic voting catastrophe. I believe the legacy contact system is far and away superior to any mess like democratic voting by social peers. It's specified by the person THEMSELVES, as it is after all their account, their life, and their identity being handled here. For those that don't specify a legacy contact, respect their privacy settings and don't auto-opt them into new features that deactivate previously set privacy settings... I'm looking at you FACEBOOK, just because you launch version 2.0.whatever of the insert-feature-here, that doesn't mean the default setting for all previous versions of that system should flip to PUBLIC "magically". Fuck Facebook.
notahacker 8y ago
I would not want to first hear of my friend's death via an automated Facebook notification, still less in the form of an invitation to vote on whether to honour a family member's request to remove the profile.

ThbTs4wbXC9Qjv 8y ago

Some people don't want all of their friends and family to be notified when they die... so while your transparency idea sounds good in THEORY, I fundamentally disagree with it. Ditto for your appeal process idea. Some people prefer to fade away in silence with dignity (from their point of view). That said, both of your ideas have merit if they are proposed to users as available OPTIONS that can be manually activated/opted into, but I would hope they never make them the default behavior. Losing someone close is hard enough without turning it into some democratic voting catastrophe. I believe the legacy contact system is far and away superior to any mess like democratic voting by social peers. It's specified by the person THEMSELVES, as it is after all their account, their life, and their identity being handled here. For those that don't specify a legacy contact, respect their privacy settings and don't auto-opt them into new features that deactivate previously set privacy settings... I'm looking at you FACEBOOK, just because you launch version 2.0.whatever of the insert-feature-here, that doesn't mean the default setting for all previous versions of that system should flip to PUBLIC "magically". Fuck Facebook.

notahacker 8y ago

I would not want to first hear of my friend's death via an automated Facebook notification, still less in the form of an invitation to vote on whether to honour a family member's request to remove the profile.