Facebook has been criticised in the past for refusing to remove the pages of deceased users.
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There will be more dead users on Facebook than living ones by the end of this century, a PhD researcher has predicted.
Sadikki said he worked out the figure by making the assumption that the growth that Facebook enjoys today will start slowing down sooner than we think.
Dead profile pages are a growing phenomenon on the social networking site with Facebook opting to “memorialise” the deceased by preserving their profile content rather than simply pull the plug on them in the hope that friends and family will continue to visit in order to share memories and thoughts. Combining this with Facebook’s refusal to have an automatic deletion tool for dead will result in the living being outnumbered.
The stats whiz says Facebook’s freaky future predicament will be due to a decline in new users signing up over the next 80-odd years, coupled with the tech company’s policy of not automatically deleting the accounts of users who have passed away. The Ph.D. statistician candidate also assumed that the social network won’t change its existing policy on handling dead users.
Digital Beyond, a blogging company about digital existence, indicated that approximately 9,72,000 US Facebook users will die in 2016! The only time the profile of a dead person can leave Facebook is when a relative or a person they appointed to manage their accounts when they die or a person with whom they shared their login information deletes the account.
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For some, the fact that loved ones can still appear on Facebook can be quite upsetting, especially when other users are notified of birthdays or reminded of special occasions they had previously shared with dearly departed loved ones whenever they log in to their newsfeed. The contact can even update cover and profile photo.
