Something sad and scary happened to a friend of mine lately. Hackers got their hands on her deceased sister’s Facebook account and a lot of precious memories were lost. There’s a step you can take to protect your Facebook account after you’re gone. Facebook allows you to designate a legacy contact for your account, should you pass away. This person will be able to do things like post a goodbye message to your Facebook friends.
Legacy contacts can also respond to new friend requests and update your profile picture and cover photos. That contact can also download all of the material you’ve shared to Facebook, such as photos and videos.
Facebook may also permit additional capabilities for these contacts in the future.
For now, your legacy contact cannot log into the account, change or remove posts, read private messages or delete friends.
Here’s how to designate your legacy contact. Click the drop-down arrow in the top right of your Facebook page and select Settings and Privacy.
Then choose Settings.
Under General select Memorialization settings.
You can then select a Facebook friend to be your contact or select to have your account deleted when you pass away.
That person will be notified when your account is memorialized and you can choose to send that person a message right away. You can also choose to permit that person to download your data archive of photos, videos and posts when you’re gone. That person will not have access to your account until it is memorialized. To learn how to memorialize an account, click here.
Your legacy contact will be able to moderate the posts shared to the new tributes section by changing tagging settings, removing tags and editing who can post and see posts.
This allows them to control posts they feel might be upsetting for your friends and family. They’ll also be able to update the your profile picture and cover photo as well as pin a post to the top of your profile.
Those under 18 can’t set legacy contacts, but parents who have lost children under 18 can request to become their legacy contact.
If you’d prefer that your account be deleted after you’re gone, you can request that your account be deleted after death.
This is also a good thing to use if you tend to walk on the wrong side of the law. A friend of mine got arrested and convicted to several years and he had no access to his facebook profile and he was told that having an “active” Facebook account (even though he couldn’t access it) was a punishable offence. Lucky for him he used my computer so I was able to get into his account and close it (after downloading his content). So if you are off to the pokey with smokey you should have someone you can call to take care of this matter for you.
This would be great except the Legacy Contact is not an option in my FB settings. Is this feature active on all FB accounts or is this still an ongoing process? I’ve been all over my settings and have yet to locate this feature. Do I need to activate the feature somewhere? Any suggestions would be helpful.
Thanks
Terry it should be available in both the browser and mobile version of Facebook under Settings and then Security. Legacy Contact should be the last option on the list for your Security Settings.
Really surprised, Facebook doesn’t require ‘parent or guardian’ for all accounts