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Facebook will leave your privacy settings intact after you die

The social network will no longer change dead users’ pages to the highest privacy setting

Facebook users whose friends and family have died leaving profiles on the site will be able to request Look Back videos for their loved ones.

The site has also changed its policies regarding memorial accounts to allow users to retain in death the privacy settings they selected in life.

This will allow people to see memorialized profiles in a manner consistent with the deceased person’s expectations of privacy, said Facebook’s Chris Price and Alex DiSclafani in a blog post. We are respecting the choices a person made in life while giving their extended community of family and friends ongoing visibility to the same content they could always see.

Both changes affect memorial pages, profiles of users who have died and whose family members have requested the page be left open in memory of the deceased. The tradition began as an ad-hoc practice, but in 2009 the company made the practice official, in part to prevent users being asked to “get in touch” with dead friends.

Until now, memorial pages have automatically been set at the friends-only privacy setting, allowing only those who were friends with the page’s subject in life to see their account after death.

Facebook will also let users who have suffered the loss of a loved one request to view that person’s own look back video, the short round-up of past activity on the site that Facebook produced for its tenth anniversary. As Price and DiSclafani explain, the impetus was a user request:

For one man in Missouri, the Look Back video he was most desperate to watch was one that had not yet been made. John Berlin reached out to ask if it was possible for Facebook to create a video for his son, Jesse, who passed away in 2012. We had not initially made the videos for memorialized accounts, but John’s request touched the hearts of everyone who heard it, including ours.