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A Nova Scotia woman is fighting to have her deceased son’s social media account removed.
Joanne MacLean says she finds it terribly upsetting when she logs onto Facebook and her son’s profile pops up, nearly two years after he died.
MacLean’s youngest son, Craig Farrell, died in November 2013.
“All of a sudden his picture is there and it hurts, it really hurts. No one has any idea unless they’re in this position. It’s not good, it doesn’t make for a good day,” she said.
MacLean wants to have family photos from Anthony’s account and then she wants to shut it down.
“The photographs are wonderful memories. It’s really important to hold those memories because that’s all you have” she said.
She’s emailed and messaged Facebook several times to close the account, but has never received a response.
MacLean keeps trying to get into her son’s account on her own using different email addresses and passwords, but has never succeeded.
“I’ve tried to take it down and I can’t, there’s no way humanly possible. I’m not a hacker,” she said.
Tanya Butler, an estate lawyer with the law firm Stewart McKelvey in Halifax, said this kind of thing is happening more and more often.
After the death of a loved one, people realize they have no control over the person’s digital life. Social media accounts, email and sometimes online banking information are all inaccessible.
Butler has had clients try to get photos off social media with little success.
“Some of them have tried to contact service providers and will often give up because they end up going through an awful lot of red tape. And there’s a lot on the plate of an executor or family member dealing with a death already,” she said.
Facebook responds
Butler said the law in Canada is still in flux when it comes to handling digital material once someone dies.
“Nobody really knows what an executor’s obligations are or what their rights are,” she said.
A spokesperson for Facebook says it will get in contact with Joanne MacLean and shut down her son’s account.
Facebook also recently added a legacy contact feature which allows a person to name someone they wish to have access to their account after they die. The feature became available in Canada at the end of April.
Agencies/Canadajournal
Facebook is an abomination. She is having all kinds of trouble with them over this BUT she still continues to use it???? If I was as upset as she is with them, I would correspond with them to get what I wanted, but certainly would not use their “product”.
Facebook execs are only interested in their own greed. Compassion does not enter into their minds. Like the mafia…once you are in you can never get out.
Its easy to fix. Just tell them you no longer want to be part of Zuckerbergs Kibbutzim. They’ll delete it fast.
You have the ability to “ignore” a users posts. This would stop him from showing up in her feed, her photos, her “suggested contacts” etc. If she ignores it, they won’t even show up in the results if she searches his name. Why should she get rights to take down his profile?
I agree with facebook. It has nothing to do with greed or compassion. Its not her profile.
I am not sure what Facebook’s’ response was. I didn’t see it as part of this article but would love to see it.
My sister passed away almost 3 years ago and her account is still active and there’s nothing we can do about it. Because she had her account set up for her to sign in automatically, we were able to “share” her photo’s with another member of our family and did the same thing with anything we felt should be saved then we deleted everything item by item.
People she hadn’t communicated in a while and didn’t know she had passed away with were sending her birthday wishes, happy mother’s wishes etc. That’s when we knew we had to do something about it.
It was odd receiving those “adds” that say “You Might Know” … and my dead sisters picture shows up. At first it kind of freaks you out. That’s when we knew we had to do something about it.
We logged into her Facebook account and changed everything, from her name, we took her profile picture off and replaced it with a generic picture and deleted all of her personal information, there were something’s that we had an issue deleting and not replacing so we used fake information.
We even went into the personal information section that allows people to find using her name, email address, or phone number and deleted everything. We ran into an issue because we didn’t want to enter a legit email to verify or approve the changes, so we set up a fake email address. Once we were sure everything was taken down, we deleted the fake email address we set up in order to validate the changes to her facebook page. Now we get nothing and that “dummy” facebook page is still up and running.
I guess they do that in order to say that have so many members when in fact they really don’t.
After all that, we found the option to DEACTIVATE YOUR ACCOUNT. Know we know.