Social Media Accounts and Death

Social Media Accounts and Death

There are a lot of financial and legal steps you need to take when someone you love passes away and has a service at a funeral home in Summertown, TN. But what about the deceased’s online accounts? You can’t just leave a deceased’s social media or otherwise online life behind.

Our digital footprints will only get bigger the longer our society spends online. If you want to make things easier on your family and loved ones when you’re gone, start making a list of all your accounts, usernames, and passwords now so they have easy access to your information.

There are certain steps you must take to close down accounts and otherwise manage their digital legacy. Use these tips to take care of common online accounts after a death:

Twitter – Twitter will work with a verified immediate family member or an executor of an estate to deactivate a deceased’s account. You must submit a request for a deactivation and removal online, upon which you will be sent an email with instructions for providing proper documentation of your relationship to the deceased and the death.

Google – Thankfully, Google accounts are fairly easy to deal with. If the deceased had any kind or any number of Google accounts, from Google Docs, Google Drive, Google Calendar to Google Photos, Gmail or even YouTube, they had a Google ID. Google has a program called Inactive Account Manager in which someone can preset all data and accounts linked to their Google ID to be wiped after a certain period of inactivity. If the deceased used that program, your work is done. If they didn’t, simply file a request to Google, submit documents proving your relationship to the deceased, and the company will close down the Google ID.

Instagram – Instagram is similar to Facebook in that it allows the bereaved to delete or memorialize an account. Only immediate family members can file a request to delete an Instagram account, and they are required to submit proof of relationship and proof of death, such as a death certificate. Instagram accounts can be memorialized once the company gets a valid request backed up by death documentation and proof of relationship. A memorialized Instagram account can’t be changed at all, and the posts will only be visible to the audience with which they were first shared. In other words, you can’t make a memorialized account public if it was originally private.

Do you want to learn more about dealing with death at a Summertown, TN funeral home? Get in touch with Williams Funeral Home & Crematory for assistance.