 |
| Legacy contacts timeline |
California: Social networking giant Facebook is putting its users in control of what happens to their accounts after they die.
A new "legacy contact" feature, announced Thursday on the site's blog, will allow you to select a family member or friend who can control certain aspects of your page once you've passed away.
Users can grant another person on Facebook permission to manage an account on their behalf and their account can become a memorial of their life, friendships and experiences.
Alternatively, people can let the Facebook know if they’d prefer to have their Facebook account permanently deleted after death.
Facebook calls this person an account's "legacy contact," and users will be able to choose that person through the website's or app's security page.
If you chose to set up a legacy contact, that person will be able to change your profile photo, accept friend requests, and pin announcements on your account's timeline after Facebook receives notice of your death.
A legacy contact won't be able to post as the account that they're controlling, nor will they be able to view that person's private messages.
Facebook will also provide an option to let legacy contacts download a file containing an account's photos, posts, and other information.
Until now, Facebook offered a process to freeze accounts after death, but there was no way to set them up to be managed by someone else or automatically deleted.
Facebook has introduced the 'legacy contacts' feature in the US first and looking forward to expanding to more countries. Setting up a legacy contact is completely optional.
Here's how you access it:
Select "Legacy Contact" - It's at the bottom of your "Security Settings" menu.
A legacy contact is someone you choose to manage your account after you passes away.
If you don't want a Facebook account after you passes away, you can request to have your account permanently deleted.
The new feature, which comes 11 years after the immensely popular social network launched, follows some controversy about how Facebook has handled deceased user accounts.