15 ms·

Are the dead taking over Facebook?

191 points by lichtenberger 8y ago

tenaciousDaniel 8y ago
One thing I find fascinating, and have not seen discussed, is what will happen to all this data in, say, a couple hundred years. 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.
- zrail 8y ago
  Assuming the hard drives survive and someone can read them. The advantage of paper is that you just have to understand the language. Digital archives require a lot of technology to read, even before you get to the point of understanding the language.
  - tenaciousDaniel 8y ago
    Yeah there's definitely a chance that it won't survive. In which case the opposite conclusion is equally interesting, since this period would be an uncharacteristically Dark Age, with very little written paper to store as its memory. No one writes diaries anymore.
    - adrianN 8y ago
      I'd guess that there are still orders of magnitudes more paper diaries, newspapers and other records around than a few hundred years ago. General literacy is a very recent thing.
    - toastal 8y ago
      I mean we do that with dead languages... We piece them together given related langugages and clues in the grammar. I'm sure we can turn zeros and ones back into something readable... 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.
      - umanwizard 8y ago
        What makes you think current encryption is breakable?
    - decasia 8y ago
      Well, I still write diaries on paper. 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 :)
- close04 8y ago
  > provide a uniquely intimate glimpse of life in the past. 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.
  - tenaciousDaniel 8y ago
    You're forgetting about private FB messages, lol.
- codetrotter 8y ago
  > 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 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.
  - TaupeRanger 8y ago
    And then you start thinking, "what even is this desire I feel for these future possibilities? Where does that come from and why is it so?" Will people in the future even share our current preferences? What happens to us when science advances to the point that we can hack our own reward functions (preferences)?
    - epicide 8y ago
      What happens when you set yourself to be disgusted[0] at the idea of changing your own preferences? [0]: I'm assuming you can also go the opposite way.
      - TaupeRanger 8y ago
        What happens when you set yourself to have no preferences?
- ardy42 8y ago
  > One thing I find fascinating, and have not seen discussed, is what will happen to all this data in, say, a couple hundred years. 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.
  - tenaciousDaniel 8y ago
    I think you're probably right - for a period of time. But I'm imagining far into the future. 200-300 years.
  - epicide 8y ago
    Even if Facebook-the-product dies[0], Facebook-the-company will continue to be around for a looong time. Even if they fall out of public favor, they have enough money, enough data, enough business connections, etc. to continue for a very long time [1]. 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 :)
    - CharlesColeman 8y ago
      > they would likely use Zuckerberg as a scapegoat and ditch him IIRC, Zuckerberg has a controlling stake in Facebook through supervoting shares, so he's not getting ditched unless he wants to be ditched.
- LeonM 8y ago
  Interesting thought. 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.
- pastor_elm 8y ago
  It's not facebook's right to allow anyone to have access to those accounts, especially once you and everyone you knew are dead.
- SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
  I look forward to historical articles being written about the tide pod challenge of 2016.
  - tenaciousDaniel 8y ago
    You joke, but I honestly cannot imagine how our future generations will perceive us if they can look back and see that type of thing. 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.
    - TaupeRanger 8y ago
      Well one possibility is that they will be dealing with even wierder shit than Tide Pods (imagine the horrific possibilities of advanced virtual reality sims). Our current "errors" may seem mild by comparison.
      - coldtea 8y ago
        Or just that all this BS will be lost, when FB goes out of fashion, and be as relevant and accessible to future generations as AOL, MySpace, or old USENET threads are to us...
    - epicide 8y ago
      > I don't know if there's a precedent for looking back and feeling completely unimpressed and underwhelmed 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.
  - shpx 8y ago
    How many articles about jokes from 1913 have you read? Do you care? What makes you think future generations will care about yours?
- kerng 8y ago
  Digital data is more volatile then you think, unless actively archived a lot of it will just disappear when Facebook goes out of business. Look what happened with Myspace and what they deleted...
  - int_19h 7y ago
    I suspect that a lot of Myspace content was scrapped, and is floating around in databases to this day. 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.
- arkades 8y ago
  > One thing I find fascinating, and have not seen discussed, is what will happen to all this data in, say, a couple hundred years. 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.
  - lostphilosopher 8y ago
    Are people not writing in physical diaries to prevent future breeches of privacy? (Odd to think of Facebook etc. like that.) Or are people doing it out of convenience / least resistance? If so, are they cognizant of what this means for the longevity of the data? I'm not sure the future impact is an intentional choice...
  - JudgeWapner 8y ago
    Nothing odd about being aware of the historical impact of our lives.
- JudgeWapner 8y ago
  There will be so much of it that it will just sound like noise to them. They'll probably have software that mines through petabytes of shitposts to find specific things but I doubt they will be impressed with any of us, even the most prescient or famous ones. Their software will classify the sentiment into canned personality types similar to INTJ, but redefined for internet personas. Nobody will read it manually because we're all just another permutation of "INT...Whatever" like the other 18 million people who posted the same ideas/emotions/sentiment. Kinda sad.
  - 2bitencryption 8y ago
    some people are interested in the noise. someone will be interested. interested in you specifically? unlikely. but interested in the mundane lives of long-dead strangers? for sure. 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...
- gugagore 8y ago
  You might enjoy this book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasshouse_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasshouse_(novel) and others that play on the idea of a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_dark_age https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_dark_age
  - tenaciousDaniel 8y ago
    Interesting; I'll take a look. Thanks!
- anderspitman 8y ago
  I think about this a lot. There's the obvious archival problem, to ensure the data is preserved along with a machine to read it or instructions on how to build such a machine. 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.
  - int_19h 7y ago
    > to ensure the data is preserved along with a machine to read it or instructions on how to build such a machine 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.
- beautifulfreak 7y ago
  I made a similar comment on HN last week and was downvoted, for reasons I can't fathom. I agree, it would be a valuable trove of info, an "objective history."
p0rkbelly 8y ago
Thought this was a GoT post.
giancarlostoro 8y ago
Worse yet a relative of mine passed away almost 10 years ago due to an accident. His "other family" decided to take over his account. They used it to spam insults towards someone who was there during the accident and threw blame for the death. It was disgraceful. 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).
- Larrikin 8y ago
  Back when I was in high school, nearly a decade ago, a classmate died and her friends were careful to not report it to Facebook because they wanted her account to stay active. At that time it seemed like Facebook had a policy of sunsetting accounts after a mourning period where the family could get the data off it. Is that not a policy anymore?
  - skibbityboop 8y ago
    Nah, my best friend died 5 years ago, his FB account is still up. I suppose it's possible that everyone posting on his wall when his birthday hits each year might reset some counter, though.
    - rootusrootus 8y ago
      As far as I can remember, you have to tell them the person died, they don't algorithmically try to detect that part.
  - smelendez 8y ago
    It's now up to the family to either have Facebook keep it up as a memorial account or ask that it be taken down. https://www.facebook.com/help/1111566045566400/?helpref=hc_fnav https://www.facebook.com/help/1111566045566400/?helpref=hc_f...
akeck 8y ago
The kids I know are, for now, skipping Facebook proper (for IG, etc.). If user inflow ends up less than the death rate, it's somewhat inevitable that the dead take over.
skykooler 8y ago
Randall Munroe of XKCD had an interesting write-up on this question a few years ago: https://what-if.xkcd.com/69/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/69/
drivingmenuts 8y ago
While historians love to peer into the minutiae of daily lives because, well, historians, how much does knowing Great-great Aunt Ethyll’s thoughts on Karl Marx actually affect us on a daily basis? How much will your predilection for the song stylings of Kim Kardashian affect future generations in a meaningful way? 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.
- matz1 8y ago
  Well you don't want to see it but others might, they can have their own reason no matter how absurd its to you.
- ddebernardy 8y ago
  > how much does knowing Great-great Aunt Ethyll’s thoughts on Karl Marx actually affect us on a daily basis? How much will your predilection for the song stylings of Kim Kardashian affect future generations in a meaningful 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).
- kristianc 8y ago
  > While historians love to peer into the minutiae of daily lives because, well, historians, how much does knowing Great-great Aunt Ethyll’s thoughts on Karl Marx actually affect us on a daily basis? How much will your predilection for the song stylings of Kim Kardashian affect future generations in a meaningful way? 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.
Benjamin_Dobell 8y ago
My father passed away a couple of years ago. It was the kind of awkward conversation I never imagined having whereby I had to kindly ask my step-mother to please stop using my deceased father's Facebook account. Granted, I get on extremely well with my step-mother and I've no doubt she meant well - it's quite likely she wanted to continue to use the account as way to remain connected with my father. 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.
- gambiting 8y ago
  After my dad passed away, getting a Skype popup "<dad> is available" was heartbreaking. My mum switched his laptop on, I had to make sure his accounts wouldn't appear as available after that.
  - tashoecraft 8y ago
    My nephews babysitter has Facetimed me from my dead sister's iPad accidentally a few times, very heartbreaking to see it pop up.
    - gowld 8y ago
      The UI certainly is often poor, particularly in the FaceTime case, but as a general matter, being reminded of a late loved one gives random opportunities to remember, reminisce, and to speak of the departed to children and newer acquaintances, which honors their legacy.
      - febeling 8y ago
        The avatars the various communication channels use online for their users stand in for the actual user an its actions. If they keep on acting after someone has deceased it’s weird to see. I’ve experienced it with my dad’s Skype account. I can’t see how that would be different for anybody in practice.
matz1 8y ago
Its facinating that this could cause cultural change on how most people relate with death. Interesting time.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
jwilk 8y ago
Direct link to PDF: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/2053951719842540 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/205395171984254...
Fede_V 8y ago
Slightly OT, but, did anyone else get echoes of Gogol looking at the paper? :)
ghostbrainalpha 8y ago
My question about Facebook data is regarding historical research. If Facebook is around for 100-200 years, is there a point at which my data should no longer be protected and private? Should historians have access to Obama's private Facebook messages in 150 years just like we have Washington or Jefferson's private correspondence?
- lostlogin 8y ago
  They can do this now, I’m guessing the key is that is must make them moneyey. 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.” https://m.facebook.com/about/privacy/update?refid=42 https://m.facebook.com/about/privacy/update?refid=42
incanus77 8y ago
My wife passed away early (36) three years ago today. 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 ____).
- dpcx 8y ago
  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.
  - Zenst 8y ago
    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+).
    - gjs278 8y ago
      digital cemeteries are not important at all. and it’s a first amendment violation to make them change anything.
baron816 8y ago
>Our analysis suggests that a minimum of 1.4 billion users will pass away before 2100 if Facebook ceases to attract new users as of 2018. Yep, every company’s customer/user base will die in 80 years if they don’t grow at all.
menzoic 8y ago
A co-worker of mine (lead architect) passed away a few months ago and his messages still show up frequently in Slack history searches and git blames. Feels weird that I could still DM the account.
sumitgt 8y ago
It is really nice that Facebook provides the "memorial" feature. Some important sites like LinkedIn lack this. I often get notifications asking me to "Congratulate ___ on completing 3 years at ___" when I know that the person has passed away.
your-nanny 8y ago
I had a Facebook friend who died, of cancer. For the next several months I continued to receive product recommendations and other "activity" notifications "from" her. At that point I decided Facebook was a dehumanizing platform and quit.
- Gibbon1 8y ago
  A friend died and after a few years his twitter account started occasionally posting spam. I made a joke to his sister that he was trying to contact us from beyond via twitter spam. She thought that was funny because that totally would be him. But she had to close his account because it was real bothering other people.
everdev 8y ago
If the dead remain on social networks in perpetuity they'll make up a larger and larger % of the user base and actually have a significant statistical impact on the ratio of accounts vs. active users. It would take some sustained high birth rates or a dramatic decrease in death rates to reverse this. 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. https://www.prb.org/howmanypeoplehaveeverlivedonearth/ https://www.prb.org/howmanypeoplehaveeverlivedonearth/
- chillacy 8y ago
  I’m somehow amazed that everyone alive is a whopping 7% of everyone that ever lived.
b0rsuk 8y ago
Sounds like a title of a parody horror movie!
slackfan 8y ago
Part of the reason I deleted my last quasi-anonymous FB account was the feed page turning into an obituary section with more than a few old friends passing.
PorterDuff 8y ago
Huh. So can you script Friendface so that it sends out pre-scheduled posts? Dead me could really mess with people that way. Now that I think of it, it would be an interesting hobby to build a virtual you that does things on Facebook.
- toper-centage 8y ago
  Everyone on HN is dead except you.
  - PorterDuff 7y ago
    Solipsist News
- tty2300 8y ago
  Someone recently built a bot that automates being an intsagram thot and sends him emails whenever a business offers the account free meals at restaurants so they just check their email for free stuff and never touch the website. A bot goes around scanning for viral posts to repost and following and unfollowing other users.
zackmorris 8y ago
I thought this was going to be an article about online zombies, who are alive but act like trolls (is there a word for this?) 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 :-)
Zenst 8y ago
Whatever you think of social media, it has become for many a long past good sole, a digital cemetery. 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.
DorothyPhillips 8y ago
Well that's an odd thought. It seems inevitable though unless they suspend accounts that are inactive after a certain period of time. I think facebook is the one that needs to die though
workingpatrick 8y ago
Because their login requirements are annoying: https://sci-hub.tw/10.1177/2053951719842540 https://sci-hub.tw/10.1177/2053951719842540
jacquesm 8y ago
I wrote a piece about this a while ago: https://jacquesmattheij.com/deadbook-the-long-term-facebook/ https://jacquesmattheij.com/deadbook-the-long-term-facebook/
29aprthrowaway 8y ago
Lurker here, apologies for the throwaway acct. 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.
MikeGale 8y ago
There's some talk of regulation, and people who never knew individuals getting in on the act. 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.
hunterjoe984 8y ago
Yes, they are
pertymcpert 8y ago
I really hope I pass away before my wife. I can’t imagine losing her. Selfish probably...
Alexharper 7y ago
I was able to read all the messages she has been sending and also check her snap and saw her and a guy when they went Clubbing........and when they were also having fun and all i read there text also when she told the guy to come over to the house so they could spend the night together after seeing all this i was fucked but THEHACKINGTEAM007 AT GMail. com OR +13232095475 did a very smart job for me thank you.

191 points by lichtenberger 8y ago

One thing I find fascinating, and have not seen discussed, is what will happen to all this data in, say, a couple hundred years. 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.

zrail 8y ago
Assuming the hard drives survive and someone can read them. The advantage of paper is that you just have to understand the language. Digital archives require a lot of technology to read, even before you get to the point of understanding the language.
- tenaciousDaniel 8y ago
  Yeah there's definitely a chance that it won't survive. In which case the opposite conclusion is equally interesting, since this period would be an uncharacteristically Dark Age, with very little written paper to store as its memory. No one writes diaries anymore.
  - adrianN 8y ago
    I'd guess that there are still orders of magnitudes more paper diaries, newspapers and other records around than a few hundred years ago. General literacy is a very recent thing.
  - toastal 8y ago
    I mean we do that with dead languages... We piece them together given related langugages and clues in the grammar. I'm sure we can turn zeros and ones back into something readable... 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.
    - umanwizard 8y ago
      What makes you think current encryption is breakable?
  - decasia 8y ago
    Well, I still write diaries on paper. 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 :)
close04 8y ago
> provide a uniquely intimate glimpse of life in the past. 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.
- tenaciousDaniel 8y ago
  You're forgetting about private FB messages, lol.
codetrotter 8y ago
> 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 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.
- TaupeRanger 8y ago
  And then you start thinking, "what even is this desire I feel for these future possibilities? Where does that come from and why is it so?" Will people in the future even share our current preferences? What happens to us when science advances to the point that we can hack our own reward functions (preferences)?
  - epicide 8y ago
    What happens when you set yourself to be disgusted[0] at the idea of changing your own preferences? [0]: I'm assuming you can also go the opposite way.
    - TaupeRanger 8y ago
      What happens when you set yourself to have no preferences?
ardy42 8y ago
> One thing I find fascinating, and have not seen discussed, is what will happen to all this data in, say, a couple hundred years. 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.
- tenaciousDaniel 8y ago
  I think you're probably right - for a period of time. But I'm imagining far into the future. 200-300 years.
- epicide 8y ago
  Even if Facebook-the-product dies[0], Facebook-the-company will continue to be around for a looong time. Even if they fall out of public favor, they have enough money, enough data, enough business connections, etc. to continue for a very long time [1]. 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 :)
  - CharlesColeman 8y ago
    > they would likely use Zuckerberg as a scapegoat and ditch him IIRC, Zuckerberg has a controlling stake in Facebook through supervoting shares, so he's not getting ditched unless he wants to be ditched.
LeonM 8y ago
Interesting thought. 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.
pastor_elm 8y ago
It's not facebook's right to allow anyone to have access to those accounts, especially once you and everyone you knew are dead.
SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
I look forward to historical articles being written about the tide pod challenge of 2016.
- tenaciousDaniel 8y ago
  You joke, but I honestly cannot imagine how our future generations will perceive us if they can look back and see that type of thing. 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.
  - TaupeRanger 8y ago
    Well one possibility is that they will be dealing with even wierder shit than Tide Pods (imagine the horrific possibilities of advanced virtual reality sims). Our current "errors" may seem mild by comparison.
    - coldtea 8y ago
      Or just that all this BS will be lost, when FB goes out of fashion, and be as relevant and accessible to future generations as AOL, MySpace, or old USENET threads are to us...
  - epicide 8y ago
    > I don't know if there's a precedent for looking back and feeling completely unimpressed and underwhelmed 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.
- shpx 8y ago
  How many articles about jokes from 1913 have you read? Do you care? What makes you think future generations will care about yours?
kerng 8y ago
Digital data is more volatile then you think, unless actively archived a lot of it will just disappear when Facebook goes out of business. Look what happened with Myspace and what they deleted...
- int_19h 7y ago
  I suspect that a lot of Myspace content was scrapped, and is floating around in databases to this day. 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.
arkades 8y ago
> One thing I find fascinating, and have not seen discussed, is what will happen to all this data in, say, a couple hundred years. 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.
- lostphilosopher 8y ago
  Are people not writing in physical diaries to prevent future breeches of privacy? (Odd to think of Facebook etc. like that.) Or are people doing it out of convenience / least resistance? If so, are they cognizant of what this means for the longevity of the data? I'm not sure the future impact is an intentional choice...
- JudgeWapner 8y ago
  Nothing odd about being aware of the historical impact of our lives.
JudgeWapner 8y ago
There will be so much of it that it will just sound like noise to them. They'll probably have software that mines through petabytes of shitposts to find specific things but I doubt they will be impressed with any of us, even the most prescient or famous ones. Their software will classify the sentiment into canned personality types similar to INTJ, but redefined for internet personas. Nobody will read it manually because we're all just another permutation of "INT...Whatever" like the other 18 million people who posted the same ideas/emotions/sentiment. Kinda sad.
- 2bitencryption 8y ago
  some people are interested in the noise. someone will be interested. interested in you specifically? unlikely. but interested in the mundane lives of long-dead strangers? for sure. 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...
gugagore 8y ago
You might enjoy this book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasshouse_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasshouse_(novel) and others that play on the idea of a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_dark_age https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_dark_age
- tenaciousDaniel 8y ago
  Interesting; I'll take a look. Thanks!
anderspitman 8y ago
I think about this a lot. There's the obvious archival problem, to ensure the data is preserved along with a machine to read it or instructions on how to build such a machine. 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.
- int_19h 7y ago
  > to ensure the data is preserved along with a machine to read it or instructions on how to build such a machine 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.
beautifulfreak 7y ago
I made a similar comment on HN last week and was downvoted, for reasons I can't fathom. I agree, it would be a valuable trove of info, an "objective history."

p0rkbelly 8y ago

Thought this was a GoT post.

giancarlostoro 8y ago

Worse yet a relative of mine passed away almost 10 years ago due to an accident. His "other family" decided to take over his account. They used it to spam insults towards someone who was there during the accident and threw blame for the death. It was disgraceful. 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).

Larrikin 8y ago
Back when I was in high school, nearly a decade ago, a classmate died and her friends were careful to not report it to Facebook because they wanted her account to stay active. At that time it seemed like Facebook had a policy of sunsetting accounts after a mourning period where the family could get the data off it. Is that not a policy anymore?
- skibbityboop 8y ago
  Nah, my best friend died 5 years ago, his FB account is still up. I suppose it's possible that everyone posting on his wall when his birthday hits each year might reset some counter, though.
  - rootusrootus 8y ago
    As far as I can remember, you have to tell them the person died, they don't algorithmically try to detect that part.
- smelendez 8y ago
  It's now up to the family to either have Facebook keep it up as a memorial account or ask that it be taken down. https://www.facebook.com/help/1111566045566400/?helpref=hc_fnav https://www.facebook.com/help/1111566045566400/?helpref=hc_f...

akeck 8y ago

The kids I know are, for now, skipping Facebook proper (for IG, etc.). If user inflow ends up less than the death rate, it's somewhat inevitable that the dead take over.

skykooler 8y ago

Randall Munroe of XKCD had an interesting write-up on this question a few years ago: https://what-if.xkcd.com/69/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/69/

drivingmenuts 8y ago

While historians love to peer into the minutiae of daily lives because, well, historians, how much does knowing Great-great Aunt Ethyll’s thoughts on Karl Marx actually affect us on a daily basis? How much will your predilection for the song stylings of Kim Kardashian affect future generations in a meaningful way? 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.

matz1 8y ago
Well you don't want to see it but others might, they can have their own reason no matter how absurd its to you.
ddebernardy 8y ago
> how much does knowing Great-great Aunt Ethyll’s thoughts on Karl Marx actually affect us on a daily basis? How much will your predilection for the song stylings of Kim Kardashian affect future generations in a meaningful 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).
kristianc 8y ago
> While historians love to peer into the minutiae of daily lives because, well, historians, how much does knowing Great-great Aunt Ethyll’s thoughts on Karl Marx actually affect us on a daily basis? How much will your predilection for the song stylings of Kim Kardashian affect future generations in a meaningful way? 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.

Benjamin_Dobell 8y ago

My father passed away a couple of years ago. It was the kind of awkward conversation I never imagined having whereby I had to kindly ask my step-mother to please stop using my deceased father's Facebook account. Granted, I get on extremely well with my step-mother and I've no doubt she meant well - it's quite likely she wanted to continue to use the account as way to remain connected with my father. 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.

gambiting 8y ago
After my dad passed away, getting a Skype popup "<dad> is available" was heartbreaking. My mum switched his laptop on, I had to make sure his accounts wouldn't appear as available after that.
- tashoecraft 8y ago
  My nephews babysitter has Facetimed me from my dead sister's iPad accidentally a few times, very heartbreaking to see it pop up.
  - gowld 8y ago
    The UI certainly is often poor, particularly in the FaceTime case, but as a general matter, being reminded of a late loved one gives random opportunities to remember, reminisce, and to speak of the departed to children and newer acquaintances, which honors their legacy.
    - febeling 8y ago
      The avatars the various communication channels use online for their users stand in for the actual user an its actions. If they keep on acting after someone has deceased it’s weird to see. I’ve experienced it with my dad’s Skype account. I can’t see how that would be different for anybody in practice.

matz1 8y ago

Its facinating that this could cause cultural change on how most people relate with death. Interesting time.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

jwilk 8y ago

Direct link to PDF: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/2053951719842540 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/205395171984254...

Fede_V 8y ago

Slightly OT, but, did anyone else get echoes of Gogol looking at the paper? :)

ghostbrainalpha 8y ago

My question about Facebook data is regarding historical research. If Facebook is around for 100-200 years, is there a point at which my data should no longer be protected and private? Should historians have access to Obama's private Facebook messages in 150 years just like we have Washington or Jefferson's private correspondence?

lostlogin 8y ago
They can do this now, I’m guessing the key is that is must make them moneyey. 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.” https://m.facebook.com/about/privacy/update?refid=42 https://m.facebook.com/about/privacy/update?refid=42

incanus77 8y ago

My wife passed away early (36) three years ago today. 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 ____).

dpcx 8y ago
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.
- Zenst 8y ago
  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+).
  - gjs278 8y ago
    digital cemeteries are not important at all. and it’s a first amendment violation to make them change anything.

baron816 8y ago

>Our analysis suggests that a minimum of 1.4 billion users will pass away before 2100 if Facebook ceases to attract new users as of 2018. Yep, every company’s customer/user base will die in 80 years if they don’t grow at all.

menzoic 8y ago

A co-worker of mine (lead architect) passed away a few months ago and his messages still show up frequently in Slack history searches and git blames. Feels weird that I could still DM the account.

sumitgt 8y ago

It is really nice that Facebook provides the "memorial" feature. Some important sites like LinkedIn lack this. I often get notifications asking me to "Congratulate ___ on completing 3 years at ___" when I know that the person has passed away.

your-nanny 8y ago

I had a Facebook friend who died, of cancer. For the next several months I continued to receive product recommendations and other "activity" notifications "from" her. At that point I decided Facebook was a dehumanizing platform and quit.

Gibbon1 8y ago
A friend died and after a few years his twitter account started occasionally posting spam. I made a joke to his sister that he was trying to contact us from beyond via twitter spam. She thought that was funny because that totally would be him. But she had to close his account because it was real bothering other people.

everdev 8y ago

If the dead remain on social networks in perpetuity they'll make up a larger and larger % of the user base and actually have a significant statistical impact on the ratio of accounts vs. active users. It would take some sustained high birth rates or a dramatic decrease in death rates to reverse this. 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. https://www.prb.org/howmanypeoplehaveeverlivedonearth/ https://www.prb.org/howmanypeoplehaveeverlivedonearth/

chillacy 8y ago
I’m somehow amazed that everyone alive is a whopping 7% of everyone that ever lived.

b0rsuk 8y ago

Sounds like a title of a parody horror movie!

slackfan 8y ago

Part of the reason I deleted my last quasi-anonymous FB account was the feed page turning into an obituary section with more than a few old friends passing.

PorterDuff 8y ago

Huh. So can you script Friendface so that it sends out pre-scheduled posts? Dead me could really mess with people that way. Now that I think of it, it would be an interesting hobby to build a virtual you that does things on Facebook.

toper-centage 8y ago
Everyone on HN is dead except you.
- PorterDuff 7y ago
  Solipsist News
tty2300 8y ago
Someone recently built a bot that automates being an intsagram thot and sends him emails whenever a business offers the account free meals at restaurants so they just check their email for free stuff and never touch the website. A bot goes around scanning for viral posts to repost and following and unfollowing other users.

zackmorris 8y ago

I thought this was going to be an article about online zombies, who are alive but act like trolls (is there a word for this?) 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 :-)

Zenst 8y ago

Whatever you think of social media, it has become for many a long past good sole, a digital cemetery. 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.

DorothyPhillips 8y ago

Well that's an odd thought. It seems inevitable though unless they suspend accounts that are inactive after a certain period of time. I think facebook is the one that needs to die though

workingpatrick 8y ago

Because their login requirements are annoying: https://sci-hub.tw/10.1177/2053951719842540 https://sci-hub.tw/10.1177/2053951719842540

jacquesm 8y ago

I wrote a piece about this a while ago: https://jacquesmattheij.com/deadbook-the-long-term-facebook/ https://jacquesmattheij.com/deadbook-the-long-term-facebook/

29aprthrowaway 8y ago

Lurker here, apologies for the throwaway acct. 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.

MikeGale 8y ago

There's some talk of regulation, and people who never knew individuals getting in on the act. 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.

hunterjoe984 8y ago

Yes, they are

pertymcpert 8y ago

I really hope I pass away before my wife. I can’t imagine losing her. Selfish probably...

Alexharper 7y ago

I was able to read all the messages she has been sending and also check her snap and saw her and a guy when they went Clubbing........and when they were also having fun and all i read there text also when she told the guy to come over to the house so they could spend the night together after seeing all this i was fucked but THEHACKINGTEAM007 AT GMail. com OR +13232095475 did a very smart job for me thank you.