Before her 21-year-old daughter died in a sledding accident in early 2007, Pam Weiss had never logged on to Facebook. Back then, social-networking sites were used almost exclusively by the young. But she knew her daughter Amy Woolington, a UCLA student, had an account, so in her grief Weiss turned to Facebook to look for photos. She found what she was looking for and more. She was soon communicating with her daughter's many friends, sharing memories and even piecing together, through posts her daughter had written, a blueprint of things she had hoped to do. "It makes me feel good that Amy had a positive effect on so many people, and I wouldn't have had a clue if it hadn't been for Facebook," says Weiss.
And she wouldn't have had a clue if she had waited too long. She managed to copy most of her daughter's profile in the three months before Facebook took it down. (See the best social-networking applications.)
Like a growing number of grieving relatives, Weiss tapped into one of the most powerful troves of memories available: a loved one's online presence. As people spend more time at keyboards, there's less being stored away in dusty attics for family and friends to hang on to. Letters have become e‑mails. Diaries have morphed into blogs. Photo albums have turned virtual. The pieces of our lives that we put online can feel as eternal as the Internet itself, but what happens to our virtual identity after we die? (Read "Your Facebook Relationship Status: It's Complicated.")
It's a thorny question, and for now, the answer depends on which sites you use. Privacy is a major issue. So are company policies to delete inactive accounts.
Facebook amended its policy a few months after Woolington died. "We first realized we needed a protocol for deceased users after the Virginia Tech shooting, when students were looking for ways to remember and honor their classmates," says Facebook spokeswoman Elizabeth Linder. The company responded by creating a "memorial state" for profiles of deceased users, in which features such as status updates and group affiliations are removed. Only the user's confirmed friends can continue to view the profile and post comments on it.
If next of kin ask to have a profile taken down, Facebook will comply. It will not, however, hand over a user's password to let a family member access the account, which means private messages are kept just that.
Rival MySpace has a similar policy blocking account access but has fewer restrictions on profile-viewing. (This inspired an entrepreneur to create MyDeathSpace.com, which started out aggregating profiles of the deceased and has since morphed into a ghoulish tabloid.)
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E-mail is more complicated. Would you want, say, your parents to be able to access your account so they could contact all your far-flung friends — whom you don't have in your address book because you don't have an address book — and tell them that you've passed on? Maybe. Would you want them to be able to read every message you've ever sent? Maybe not.
Yahoo! Mail's rule is to keep accounts private. "The commitment Yahoo! makes to every person who signs up for an account is to treat their online activities as confidential, even after their death," says spokesman Jason Khoury. Court orders sometimes overrule that. In 2005, relatives of a Marine killed in Iraq requested access to his e‑mail account so they could make a scrapbook. When a judge sided with the family, Yahoo! copied the messages to a CD instead of turning over the account's password. Hotmail now allows family members to order a CD as long as they provide proof that they have power of attorney and a death certificate. Gmail requires the same paperwork, plus a copy of an e‑mail the deceased sent to the petitioner. (See the top iPhone applications.)
If that sounds like a lot of trouble to put your loved ones through, several companies are eager to help you plan ahead — for a fee, of course. Legacy Locker, Asset Lock and Deathswitch are among the firms offering encrypted space for people to store their passwords and other information. "Digital legacy is at best misunderstood and at worst not thought about," says Legacy Locker founder Jeremy Toeman, who came up with the idea for his company midflight, when he was imagining what would happen to his many Web domains if the plane crashed. "I would be surprised if five years from now, it's not common for people to consider their digital assets alongside their wills."
His San Francisco-based site is looking to handle all the details of your online afterlife for $30 a year or a onetime fee of $300. To determine whether you have passed on, the firm will check with two "verifiers" (people you have designated to confirm your death) and examine a death certificate.
Deathswitch, which is based in Houston, has a different system for releasing the funeral instructions, love notes and "unspeakable secrets" it suggests you store with your passwords and account info. The company will regularly send you e‑mail prompts to verify that you're still alive, at a frequency of your choosing. (Once a day? Once a year?) After a series of unanswered prompts, it will assume you're dead and release your messages to intended recipients. One message is free; for more, the company charges members $19.95 a year.
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