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There’s no getting around it, death comes to all of us and in today’s world one of the more complex issues is what is left behind on social media. For a long time Facebook has had a brutal policy: ‘memorialize’ the profile by locking down all the privacy settings and restrict visibility to friends. Now the site has found a lighter touch.
“Starting today, we will maintain the visibility of a person’s content as-is,” said Facebook in a post entitled ‘Remembering Our Loved Ones’ by Community Operations Mangers Chris Price and Alexi DiSclafani. “This will allow people to see memorialized profiles in a manner consistent with the deceased person’s expectations of privacy. We are respecting the choices a person made in life while giving their extended community of family and friends ongoing visibility to the same content they could always see.”
This switch is being followed up by nice touch. Recently all Facebook members were given a ‘Look Back’ video to commemorate the site’s 10 year anniversary. It automatically created a montage of your most popular and significant status updates, photos and videos. From this point onwards that service will be available at the request of any family member for a user who has passed away.
The move was motivated by a video plea from John Berlin on YouTube (embedded below) in which he reached out to Facebook asking if he could access a Look Back video made for his son, Jesse, who passed away in 2012. At current count the video is approaching three million views.
“We had not initially made the videos for memorialized accounts, but John’s request touched the hearts of everyone who heard it, including ours,” said Price and DiSclafani. “Since then, many others have asked us to share the Look Back videos of their loved ones, too, and we’re now glad to be able to fulfill those requests.”
Anyone who wants to request a Look Back video for a departed loved one can do so here.
For a company which has, at best, a patchy record with user privacy and its handling of profile data these are positive steps in the right direction. They also come at a time when Facebook is under immense scrutiny as to what it will do with the anonymity enjoyed by over 400M WhatsApp users following its shock $19BN purchase of the instant messaging service earlier this month.
The good news though is in reaching the grand old age of 10, Facebook is showing signs of growing up. Its explosive user growth has tailed off and its previously juvenile approach to takeovers (assimilate everything into Facebook) took a turn for the better when its $1BN purchase of Instagram saw it help the company blossom rather than rip it apart to create the most expensive photo filters service in history.
Similarly in promising users it would also respect the anonymous and ad-free service currently enjoyed by WhatsApp users, Facebook again seems to be taking on the role of fatherly conglomerate rather than spoilt Borg.
Remembering Our Loved Ones takes the same considered and respectful tone as it has so far maintained with Instagram and (at least) marketed with WhatsApp. None of which is to say you should drop your battle hardened cynicism when it comes to the way Facebook does business. It has burned us too many times for that.
But whether it is age, flat lining user numbers or a deliberate change of policy, it is nice to find something for which to pat Facebook on back. Even if learned behaviour says we should be using the opportunity to stick in the knife.
Also on Forbes
5 Key Reasons WhatsApp Is Work $19BN – To Facebook
5 Key Reasons WhatsApp Is Work $19BN – To Facebook
