Talking Trust, Social Media & Afterlife Planning

This sixth blog post in 2019 continues our mission of raising social media afterlife awareness by talking trust, social media, and afterlife planning. Social media in essence is about building relationships, and an essential component of meaningful relationships is trust. Trust can be defined as a firm belief in the reliability, truth, ability, or strength of someone or something. We trust to varying degrees in relationships with family, friends, colleagues, communities, and companies, including social media networks that connect us.

In our daily lives, society places trust in educational institutions to teach students, fiduciary duty in financial institutions to honor customers, belief in religious organizations to guide followers, faith in our government to serve citizens, and confidence in professionals such as funeral directors, attorneys, doctors, nurses, coaches, and leaders to serve our communities and best interests. All of these trustworthy constituents earn our trust by helping us improve the quality of our daily lives and our communities. 

Another major constituent in our daily lives that we rely on heavily yet often fail to trust is social media. According to the latest national poll conducted in 2018 supported by Craig Newmark Philanthropies, Rad Campaign and Lincoln Park Strategies, 87% of Americans use social media and yet 3 out of 5 Americans have very little or no trust that social networks will protect our data and information. In order to deepen our relationships with social media networks, the onus to establish trust and accountability is on us.

The majority of American adults use social media daily, and this technological innovation and communication medium gives us unprecedented freedom to share the richness of our lives socially both locally and globally with others users and the public in several forms anytime and anywhere. The free profiles we create eventually become valuable personal assets that contain photos, videos, personal information, and more. The emergence of social media is evolving the social science of relationships in person and online. 

While it may be hard to imagine society without social media, this new communication medium has only been around for a very short period of time. As with any new technology, the rewards social media provides also present emerging risks. Therefore, to help build trust and empower social media users and families, Profile Peace is dedicated to building better afterlife planning tools and technology that instills trust in using social media without waiting for social media companies to provide solutions to alleviate our increasing concerns. 

As new privacy campaigns are emerging from leading companies such as Facebook and Google, the public reception to these campaigns appears to present mixed reviews. Since social media networks profit from growing their user base and data, optimizing profits and prioritizing people’s privacy concerns poses a conflict. Rather than relying on social networks for solutions, we as a society can increase trust by taking our social media data and destiny into our own hands with pre-planning and in memoriam social media services. 

Profile Peace strives to help you enjoy the full benefits of social media while ensuring the highest level of trust to protect your data and information. As we continue our social media afterlife awareness campaign in 2019, we invite you to share stories, feedback, and resources that highlight your experiences surrounding social media, privacy, and afterlife planning for you and your loved ones. Profile Peace provides purposeful profile memorialization and closure, and we warmly welcome you to our community.

Related Resources
1. 2018 Social Media & Online Safety Survey
http://onlineprivacydata.com/2016/

2. Craig Newmark Philanthropies
https://craignewmarkphilanthropies.org

3. Experts Aren't Impressed With Google's New Privacy Tools
http://time.com/5585676/google-new-privacy-tools/

4. A Privacy-Focused Vision for Social Networking
https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/a-privacy-focused-vision-for-social-networking/10156700570096634/