You can decide what happens to your Facebook profile after you die

It’s an incredibly morbid thing to think about, but what will happen to your social media profiles after you die? Will they just sit there unused for all eternity? Or will they eventually get deleted? With Facebook’s ‘Legacy Contact’ you’ll be able to decide.

Announced yesterday, Legacy Contact allows you to decide what happens to your profile after you pass on. You can either decide to have your profile deleted, or you can have your account turned into a memorial with a nominated caretaker. For either of these things to happen, someone has to confirm with Facebook that you have actually died. The company also said that even if you don’t use the Legacy Contact system, it will respect any requests made wishes laid out in a will.

Memorial pages on Facebook do already exist, but they only exist as locked down accounts. This new system will add a ‘Remembering’ mention above the profile name, as well as allowing nominated caretakers to publish posts, accept friend requests, upload photos, download an archive of the account, or even delete it altogether. What it won’t do is let them see any private messages.

To set up your Legacy Contact, you need to head into Settings, Security, and then Legacy Contact. From there you’ll be able to customise what you want doing to your account after you’re gone. If it’s not there you’ll just have to be patient and wait for Facebook to update the system on your account.