The Unplanned Afterlife of Blogs

Posted on October 30, 2005

It has happened on more than one occasion that when a person dies and his or her blog remains in cyberspace unable to be accessed or shut down. An article in the City Paper describes the story of one individual whose blog lived on after his death.

In an article in the Yale Daily News Michael Seringhaus writes that often when a friend passes away their blog or social network profile at sites like Friendster or MySpace.com will be filled with testimonials.

In our society, it's customary to speak well of the departed. Over the past few years, I've noticed that when a friend passes away, our instinct as students is apparently to visit their profile and pay homage by eulogizing in the testimonials area. This makes for some awkward maneuvering as we, suddenly somber, try to ignore our own earlier, teasing messages still staring up from the screen. Worse yet, while we wax lyrical about the merits of the deceased, we do so mere pixels below their now-irrevocable keg-stand photo, or a transcribed drunk-text they'd surely rather forget. One has to wince.

Few social networks and blog services appear to disclose a policy for dealing with an account holder who dies. Yahoo 360 discloses its policy in its terms of service.

No Right of Survivorship and Non-Transferability. You agree that your Yahoo! account is non-transferable and any rights to your Yahoo! ID or contents within your account terminate upon your death. Upon receipt of a copy of a death certificate, your account may be terminated and all contents therein permanently deleted.

Michael Seringhaus mentions in his article that Friendster will turn the account into a memorial page but someone will need the password to activate it. Many bloggers may not give their passwords out to anyone.

You'd think someone would have dealt with this -- after all, people die all the time -- and to some extent, they have. Friendster has an official policy wherein deceased members' profiles can be converted to memorial pages. However, since this process requires that the user -- presumably someone in possession of his password, not the deceased himself -- log in and make it so, to date only a handful of people have actually exercised this option.

Death also causes similar problems with email but most major email providers have plans for dealing with the issue. If no surviving friend or family member has a password some email providers will turn over stored emails to family members after seeing a copy of the death certificate. The best blog service policies would allow for a memorial page like mentioned above or simply allow surviving family members to remove the blog.

However, many blog services do not disclose a death policy in the terms of service which might leave the blogs of deceased bloggers remaining in cyberspace for months or even years before they are finally erased by the blog hosting provider.