How to Manage Your Online Life When You're Dead

Before her 21-year-old daughter died in a sledding accident in early 2007, Pam Weiss had never logged on to Facebook. Back then, social-networking sites were used almost exclusively by the young. But she knew her daughter Amy Woolington, a UCLA student, had an account, so in her grief Weiss turned to Facebook to look for photos. She found what she was looking for and more. She was soon communicating with her daughter's many friends, sharing memories and even piecing together, through posts her daughter had written, a blueprint of things she had hoped to do. "It makes me feel good that Amy had a positive effect on so many people, and I wouldn't have had a clue if it hadn't been for Facebook," says Weiss.

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And she wouldn't have had a clue if she had waited too long. She managed to copy most of her daughter's profile in the three months before Facebook took it down. (See the best social-networking applications.)

Like a growing number of grieving relatives, Weiss tapped into one of the most powerful troves of memories available: a loved one's online presence. As people spend more time at keyboards, there's less being stored away in dusty attics for family and friends to hang on to. Letters have become e‑mails. Diaries have morphed into blogs. Photo albums have turned virtual. The pieces of our lives that we put online can feel as eternal as the Internet itself, but what happens to our virtual identity after we die? (Read "Your Facebook Relationship Status: It's Complicated.")

It's a thorny question, and for now, the answer depends on which sites you use. Privacy is a major issue. So are company policies to delete inactive accounts.

Facebook amended its policy a few months after Woolington died. "We first realized we needed a protocol for deceased users after the Virginia Tech shooting, when students were looking for ways to remember and honor their classmates," says Facebook spokeswoman Elizabeth Linder. The company responded by creating a "memorial state" for profiles of deceased users, in which features such as status updates and group affiliations are removed. Only the user's confirmed friends can continue to view the profile and post comments on it.

If next of kin ask to have a profile taken down, Facebook will comply. It will not, however, hand over a user's password to let a family member access the account, which means private messages are kept just that.

Rival MySpace has a similar policy blocking account access but has fewer restrictions on profile-viewing. (This inspired an entrepreneur to create MyDeathSpace.com, which started out aggregating profiles of the deceased and has since morphed into a ghoulish tabloid.)

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