Ask HN: Social networks and profiles of dead people

6 points

9 years ago

While looking for some utility today, I stumbled upon a useful project which will probably cover my use case. The project page sadly reports the news about the author's death. I wondered what would be about his online presence, since the person was running a business, he probably would be on LinkedIn (he is and the profile is not up to date).

A great percentage of developers have online projects and a very detailed profile on LinkedIn at least, and in general the same happens on Facebook and other networks. Sooner or later these profiles will be out of date, i.e. unaware of people's departure, the number is destined to grow in time. How are social networks going to keep up? Will families always take care of removing this data, do they even bother or know?

LinkedIn and Facebook have processes [1][2] and settings [3], I'm not sure how well these perform, but are they going to scale anyway? Is LinkedIn/Facebook/your-preferred-network willing to keep online thousands of dead profiles, taking the risk of being labelled "graveyard", "cemetery"? What kind of ads are they going to show on these pages, or else what's the business model to monetize dead people?

(I guess it's one of those 1st world problem, but still)

  [1] https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/2842
  [2] https://www.facebook.com/help/150486848354038
  [3] https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=security&section=memorialization