Barbara Ortutay of Associated Press set off a new round of news stories on Facebook’s “memorializing” of profiles of deceased members with her report yesterday. But Facebook’s “memorializing” isn’t new. The company has been doing that since the beginning of the year. What’s new, perhaps, is that Facebook’s new “Reconnect” tool applied to memorialized profiles as well as those of the living. Stefanie Hoffman of ChannelWeb reports:
… Facebook maintains that the option to use Reconnect to stay in touch with dead people was deliberate. The social networking giant maintained in a company blog post that members could use the Reconnect feature to memorialize loved ones whose profiles remained intact by posting remembrances on their Wall.
Since I am not a Facebook user, I don’t know the answer to this, but does Facebook have a setting or question in its user preferences that asks users whether they would want their profile preserved or “memorialized” in the event of their demise? If not, Facebook might want to consider it as a way of vesting some ultimate privacy control with users.