4/28/2017 2 Comments Alive or Dead user account (#13)As advances in modern medicine continue to expand the life expectancy of people within the world, we tend to perceive death of someone we knew as tragic. Our perception of death has changed within the past couple of decades when we would see them as just another phase of life, especially when people had a lower life expectancy when compared to today. As time passed by, we see how the advancement in technology has allowed us to keep tangible pictures of the loved ones for the future. Fast forwarding to now, April 2017, we can store pictures of people in different places such as Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc. Most of these accounts tend to be public so we are able to see their pictures of them and the adventures they have. When the person is no longer with us, their social media accounts are still on and everyone is able to view their pictures and things they posted when they were alive. People who don’t even know that they are not alive will even send them friend request or even tag them into things they are doing. Currently there aren’t really any rules or regulation, that I am aware about, that deals with the removal of social media accounts for people who aren’t alive anymore. According to an according I found online called “Dead Facebook users will soon outnumber the living” states “30 million Facebook users died in the first eight years of its existence. In fact, 428 of them die every hour, so they’re practically dropping like flies. And every day, these dormant accounts receive friend requests, get tagged in photos, and sometimes, they’re even wished a happy birthday.” Even though this doesn’t seem to be an immediate life or death problem for people, but it does bring into the light the question as too when should these types of accounts be deactivated and who should be the one to give the command, whether it be the family of the deceased user or the social media company itself? My personal opinion on this is that social media sites, like Facebook, should be able to take down a deceased persons account within a year or so. If the family or loved ones want to keep user account alive, then they should either ask or petition for it to be up. But if they do that, the account should be modified in such a way that it should not accept friend request, messages, and other things that a regular, living user would use. It should also have something that is a give away that this users account is not active because the person is deceased. Even when I was thinking about this, I realized that this itself poses an ethical issue when it comes to Facebook itself knowing that a person is deceased and therefor taking action against that. Whether they should have access to that specific and somewhat private information is up for debate, but when there are literally millions of inactive accounts online, it would probably be a good idea to start deleting some of them as time goes by. http://www.theloop.ca/dead-facebook-users-will-soon-outnumber-the-living/
2 Comments
Anita Garcia
5/3/2017 10:05:45 pm
I have no counter argument, just a thought. There is this hypothetical question that has been asked before that asks how long will it be until Facebook has more dead accounts than live ones? It's an interesting thing to think about. Again, semi-related, but your blog post made me think of it. I hope you have fun entertaining the answer to that.
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5/9/2017 12:47:44 am
Jose,
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AuthorHi, my name is Jose Sanchez, but many of my friends tend to call me Pepe. I am a Computer Science major at CSUMB and this is my blog post. Enjoy! :) Archives
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