There is an afterlife! (For your profile)

This week Time magazine ran a story answering one of the great existential questions of our age: What will happen to my facebook profile after I die?

As far as mortality questions go, the answer is relatively straightforward: It will live on – that is if your surviving friends and family members say so.

Facebook’s official policy is to “memorialize” the profiles of deceased users, meaning the user’s profile will no longer appear in status updates or newsfeeds, but friends and family will still be able to post memorial messages on the person’s wall.

If a family requests it, Facebook will completely remove a dead user’s profile, but – pranksters beware – only with documentation that the person is actually deceased.

Check out the Time article:
http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1932803,00.html?xid=newsletter-weekly

I had never really thought about what would happen to my Internet identity when I’ve moved on. Hearing about this policy raises a bunch of questions.

What would I do if I accidentally stumbled upon the profile of a loved one that I had lost? Would clicking through their Halloween pictures be helpful or harmful for my mourning process?

And I wonder what Facebook will do with all of those “memorialized” profiles that it will have lying around?

Who owns the legal rights to my Facebook identity after I die?

Will be all need to start mentioning our Facebook identities in our wills?

Perhaps Facebook become the great digital archive of the future. A place where historians and sociologists go to better understand what the young people of 2009 thought and felt about the world.

What do you guys think about all this? Is Facebook’s policy a good one or does it need to be rethought? What sort of rights should the family members of the deceased have to their loved one’s electronic identity?