This series is based on the book Who Gets Your Passwords? TheSeniorTechie Guide To Digital Estate Planning by Paul Wilczynski, published by TheSeniorTechie Press.
What happens to your Facebook account when you die? Your profile isn’t turned into a memorial or deleted just because your family knows you have died. Facebook has to be told, and you can choose ahead of time which you would like.
Eight months after Bernadette’s funeral, Joyce got a Messenger message from her.
The name was right. So was the little photograph beside it. The message said there had been an emergency and asked Joyce to buy a gift card.
Joyce knew it couldn’t be Bernadette. She had attended the funeral, brought food to the house, and helped Bernadette’s daughter sort through the cupboards. Still, seeing her friend’s name above a new message stopped her.
She called the daughter. Had someone in the family started using the account?
Nobody had. Nobody had done anything with it at all.
Bernadette’s Facebook profile had stayed much as she left it: garden pictures, birthday greetings, comments about the neighborhood. In this fictional example, someone had taken over the account and was contacting her friends.
Her daughter had dealt with the house, the bank, the insurance, and the boxes of photographs. Facebook hadn’t occurred to her. There had been no bill to cancel and no envelope to open.
It was another unfinished task, discovered by someone who thought the worst of the paperwork was over.
