(WYTV)- Some 30 million Facebook accounts belong to dead people today.
One estimate says that by 2070, if Facebook’s still around, there will be more dead people with Facebook accounts than actual living users.
The newspaper the Guardian looked into this and predicted Facebook will be home to some five billion dead people by the year 2100, that’s 78 years from now.
Most people don’t think to plan for their social media accounts, they’ll write a will but have no plans at all for what will happen to their digital stuff after they’re gone. A website called Pop Crush says that’s about 90% of us. So what if the social media user is dead?
There may be an ethical question here: if the user is gone, who owns the data this user posted? Especially if the family considered it private.
And who is entitled to your digital legacy?
If you haven’t left someone you trust with your passwords in the event you die, is there anything on your social media pages that could become a problem in the future?
Facebook offers two options for now: turn the page into a memorial, the account is flagged as dead, but all the content stays up.
Or, flag them to be deleted, gone is truly gone, and other media sites offer similar plans.
