What Happens to a Person’s Facebook Account When He or She Dies?

People are mortal, but social media might be forever. As such, websites like Facebook stand to continue to provide digital resting places for people who are long gone, with recent research suggesting that the popular networking site might hold more accounts of dead users than living ones as early as 2070. In fact, by the turn of the 22nd century, as many as 4.9 billion dead people might still be "alive" on Facebook, with the majority being from India and the United States. The Oxford University researchers noted that deceased users' profiles will offer an unprecedented amount of historical information and suggested that Facebook should ask "historians, archivists, archaeologists and ethicists to participate in the process of curating the vast volume of accumulated data that we leave behind as we pass away." For its part, Facebook has been working to implement measures so that friends and relatives can either remove accounts of their late loved ones or change them to "legacy" accounts to differentiate them from those of active, living users.

Facebook facts:

• A manipulated, pixelated image of actor Al Pacino originally appeared on Facebook's homepage.
• Facebook uses blue and white in its logo because founder Mark Zuckerberg has red-green color blindness, so blue is easier for him to see.
• As of mid-2019, Facebook boasts 2.4 billion monthly users, despite being banned in China and North Korea.