Posthumous Profile Planning

Profile Peace is an online profile memorialization & closure service that helps social media users and family members lay digital identities to rest as part of modern day funeral planning.  This blog post will address pre-planning or pre-need approaches for managing social media profiles posthumously.  

As it relates to pre-need approaches, which in the context of funeral planning, means before a death has occurred, there are 4 main solutions to consider for closing or memorializing social media profiles.

1. Legal Will
2. Third Party Service
3. Trusted Person
4. Legacy Contact

First, and most formally, is to include social media profiles as part of a will. Traditionally, a will, sometimes called a “last will and testament,” is a document that states your final wishes and instructions about what should happen to property after death. A variation on a traditional will is what some call a digital will, which can be a more informal document that allows family members to close down your online accounts, including social media. This first approach can be done using a variety of estate planning services, whether online through a website like LegalZoom or more personally with an attorney in a face-to-face meeting. Either way, when family members know your account information and are granted permission to manage accounts through a formal will, they have the most control over social media profiles and can delete or memorialize profiles accordingly. While logging into the decedent’s account to delete their profile is against the Terms of Use for social networks, a will is an effective pre-need solution.

A second pre-need option is using a third-party service such as Profile Peace where a social media user can list their accounts in a secure online database along with their closure and memorialization preferences, and then authorize the service provider to submit their requests upon their death. This option is a best practice in addition to a will, and is a new and modern alternative to formal estate planning. Since more than 60% of people do not have a will or estate plan according to the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), pre-planning services like Profile Peace are a practical and cost effective social media solution. This is a new service being introduced by organizations such as Profile Peace in order to meet social media user’s directives for how to handle profiles after death. Click here to learn more about the process Profile Peace provides for listing profiles, selecting preferences, and granting legal authority to a social media service provider to act on your behalf at death.

A third pre-need option is informally sharing a list of profiles and passwords with a trusted family member, friend or other person. To reiterate, this option directly violates a social networks Terms of Use. For example, Facebook clearly states to “Not share your password, give access to your Facebook account to others, or transfer your account to anyone else (without our permission).” The idea behind this approach is that the person you trust to share the information with can log-in and delete your accounts directly. Keep in mind that sharing information with a trusted family member or friend also leaves that document open to theft or unauthorized use if left unsecured. So this pre-need solution is not a best practice, but can be a practical approach to consider in the absence of alternative solutions.

Moving onto the fourth pre-need planning solution is appointing a legacy contact for Facebook. As discussed earlier when addressing properly closing a social media profile and memorializing accounts, this is an effective solution for Facebook, but does not help close other social media accounts. The result is that the legacy contact is then granted permission to formally request the deletion of a decedent’s Facebook profile at any time.  As other social networks progress and evolve to meet the needs of their users, we hope to see similar legacy functionality in the future. Presently, the option of appointing a legacy contact does not address other social media profiles, and therefore is not considered a best practice since it is not a complete and comprehensive solution.

To summarize these four pre-planning approaches, creating a will, appointing a pre-planning service like Profile Peace, trusting a friend or family member with your passwords, or a choosing a legacy contact are the main ways to pre-plan for a decedent’s social media accounts, and having a will in place or a pre-planning service like Profile Peace are best practice solutions. Click here to learn more about our Pre-Planning  Social Media Service >