Facebook after death: What happens to the profiles?

Facebook, the biggest social networking website in the world, is the “virtual home” to more than 1.6 billion monthly active users as of 2015, according to a statistics portal. Well, these are rather big numbers and hats off to the social networking giants for monitoring so many profiles, and keeping millions of people connected.

However, have you ever thought what happens to these profiles after the owner dies? We are guessing not many people have wasted time speculating on such a diminutive issue. But there is one bizarre fact which will leave you tangled.

According to researchers, the social media giant will become the largest virtual graveyard by the end of this century—which means there will be more dead profiles on the website than living ones by 2098. Now that’s scary!

University of Massachusetts statistician Hachem Sadikki told the Daily Mail that “the social giant will turn into the world’s biggest virtual graveyard by 2098”.

Considering that Facebook is a fairly young company, the number of profiles of dead people on the website has increased rapidly since its formation in 2004. Consequently, the social networking giant’s policy to keep dead user profile data and turn it into a “memorialised” version will see an out-and-out increase in the number of dead profiles.

Digital Beyond, a blogging company about digital existence, indicated that approximately 9,72,000 US Facebook users will die in 2016!  If you think that’s a considerable number for a year, imagine the total tally of deaths after taking the whole world in to account.

There have been numerous incidents in the past where the company’s weird policy has been criticised heavily from numerous users. In the past some of them have complained that the website showed the photos of dead people on their “year in review” videos in 2015.

There have been instances where individuals have also reported receiving birthday notifications of dead users. As weird as this might sound, such an incident can lead to extreme emotional trauma, or fear; it is disrespectful to some extent as well.

Facebook has tried to mend the problem by asking users to appoint a “legacy contact” just like a beneficiary. The legacy contact can then perform the last “virtual rights” by posting one last status, accepting pending friend requests, and even changing the display and cover picture.

Facebook has not yet given any comments regarding the issue, according to media reports.