Facebook is popular social media platform with billions of users. Also, other social media apps such as Instagram, Twitter, WhatsApp, Reddit, Snapchat, and others garnering the number of users. According to the report, around 2 billion users on Facebook, 1.5 billion users on WhatsApp, 336 million on Twitter, and 1 million on Instagram. Among these, million users are from India region. Despite using such digital platforms, some of us think over that what will happen to our social media account once we decease.
The question is: How social media platforms realize the need to handover the digital possessions such as personal photographs, videos and messages to the family when a user is dead. “When someone deceases with leaving his social media accounts behind, then any recipients of the respective person can have right to access this property.” Cyber law expert Pavan Duggal said.
Facebook lets the user select a legacy contact such as a friend or family member who can manage his social media accounts when he dies. “Once someone dies, we will memorialize their account,” stated Facebook. For that purpose, the legacy contact will have to right to post on his account which will display at top of the memorialized Timeline. However, the legacy contact will not be able to log in as the person who dies or can’t see his private posts. Otherwise, you can let Facebook know to have the account deleted permanently after death.
Google, which owns YouTube, Picasa web albums and Gmail has special feature called “Inactive Account Manager” that lets a user to recommend name who can access to his information. If someone never log on for long period, their accounts can be removed permanently or shared with a nominated person.