Excerpt from: Huffington Post (click for full article)
Since the beginning of the Web, it's been plausible that pieces of information about people with Web sites and email accounts would be left accessible after they died. But the virtual cemetery is fairly new. One of the oldest online memorials is the U.K.-based Virtual Memorial Garden, which began in 1995. A simple, alphabetized collection of tens of thousands of paragraph-long, user-submitted memories of the dead, it's still growing. Since social media first gained mass appeal a decade ago with Friendster (2002) and MySpace (2003), online profiles have outlived their creators. But the skyrocketing growth of Facebook has created a new terrain for death on the Internet.
There are clear rules for how next of kin can inherit or delete accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and the countless other online manifestations of ourselves that have proliferated. Usually, family members have to submit an obituary, news article or death certificate to verify the user is dead. But unless there's a request, the rules on death are rarely enforced on social networks. Facebook allows only the living user of a registered account to have access to it -- families can't get full access to profiles unless there's documented instruction from the deceased. In a rare case in June, a Wisconsin couple obtained a court order for Facebook to give them access to the personal messages in their 23-year-old son's account after he committed suicide.
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