What happens to social media accounts after you die?

By 2065, the number of dead Facebook user profiles will outnumber the living. Or rather, that’s what absurdist scientific Q and A forum What If by XKCD estimates. Sure, there are a ton of “ifs” required to figure out that number – if Facebook doesn’t gain any more market share, if Facebook doesn’t pivot its business model – but the big question is still relevant, what happens to social media accounts after you die? And what about your loved ones? When they go, what happens to their social feeds?

“I think it’s a cultural thing – in North America we don’t like to discuss dying and we seldom prepare for death especially for young people,” Sharon Polsky, president of the Privacy and Access Council of Canada told Yahoo Canada. “Technology just makes the situation more complex.”

Especially when it works like this: you sign up for Twitter or Facebook or Instagram or InstaFace or TweetBook or whatever incarnation of experience sharing platform is all the rage and you click the agree box because let’s be honest, it’s easier than scrolling through the suspiciously long terms and conditions and privacy agreements.

“When you sign up for something like Facebook, you’re agreeing to play by their rules and their rules are created for free flow of information and pictures and content – it’s either take it or leave it with Facebook and similar sites,” says Gil Zvulony, a Toronto-based internet lawyer.

He points out that you’re not giving them your photos, you retain ownership, but you let them use it in certain ways based on your privacy settings. In other words, if you die with privacy settings ticked in an open public use setting, the social media site can use your content as they please.

“The irony is your family loses all control and has no say,” says Polsky adding that there’s not much you can do with your loved one’s social media feed.

Unless, of course, you go to the media and have the “court of public opinion” wrestle some control on your behalf like Nova Scotian woman Joanne MacLean did recently.

MacLean’s son Anthony Craig Farrell killed himself in 2013. The abrupt end to his life meant he never closed his Facebook account down and now every time MacLean logs on she’s hounded by the platform to add her dead son as a friend.

“All of a sudden his picture is there and it hurts, it really hurts. No one has any idea unless they’re in this position. It’s not good, it doesn’t make for a good day,” MacLean told the CBC adding that she’d emailed and messaged Facebook to close the account but never received a response. Ultimately, the heightened publicity helped put Facebook in contact with MacLean but only after years of continuous notifications from the ghost account.

Polsky points to an even more unsettling scenario where one might come across photos used by a social media site in an advertisement featuring a former user who had died.

“Wouldn’t that be a horrible shock?” asks Polsky.

It’s a complex issue. An email address or social media page isn’t a locked box or personal item – it’s a contract, which means it’s a legally binding agreement between two parties. As part of that, even if your family wants in, the social media company won’t give out your information. But there are exceptions.

In Facebook’s case, the social giant will turn over your password “if prior consent is obtained from or decreed by the deceased or mandated by law.” Twitter says “we can work with a person authorized to act on behalf of the estate or with a verified immediate family member of the deceased.”

Pinterest on the other hand says, “Because we want to respect the privacy of our pinners, we can’t give out any personal or log in information.” LinkedIn’s will only give out information if it “has a good faith belief that disclosure is permitted by law or is reasonably necessary to comply with a legal requirement or process.”

“You do want to think of legacy issues,” says Zvulony. “You can use the law, but it’s costly to get a court order – compared with just sharing you password with your beneficiary.”

The best way is to set up some sort of password manager software and give the master password to someone you trust. It’s the approach Facebook has taken with its legacy feature, launched in Canada at the end of April, which allows users to hand over limited access to a beneficent when they die.

But if you’re waiting for the social media to shut down a deceased’s account on their own accord, Zvulony says there’s no real incentive.

“These websites have an interest in inflated number of users,” he says. “It looks good on their books.”