“Cyber Graves”: Give Your Executor Your Facebook Password

When I came across the article, “Cyber graveyards a growing problem for legal professionals”, I realized I had never given the question much thought, but what happens to our Facebook (and other social media profiles) when we’re no longer in the land of the living?

CYBER graves are presenting a growing problem for legal professionals who urge people to leave their social network passwords with their executors in case they die.

Social networking sites like Facebook and Bebo are immortalising customers by leaving thousands of deceased sites online.

It’s hard enough to imagine the cursing my executor and heirs will be doing while going through my messy closets and drawers, much less trying to find and close my social media sites – unless I leave a list of sites and passwords.

Would I want my executor to access my Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn profiles? Yes, I would, because I’d want my virtual friends and colleagues to know that I was no longer actually in the world (or at least why I was rudely ignoring their tweets).

But I like the idea of leaving my Facebook profile as a “memorial site”. After all, I’ve chosen cremation, so there won’t be a tangible tombstone memorializing me with a pithy saying such as “Here Lies a Practical Paralegal” or to steal the epitaph from Betty Davis' gravestone, "She did it the hard way".