Who Controls Your Facebook Page After Death?

You might have a will, but have you worked out who will assume custody of your Facebook profile after death?

Last week, the New Hampshire House of Representatives passed an amendment to examine passing the rights to a Facebook page after death over to to the executor of the deceased's estate.

New Hampshire State Rep. Peter Sullivan, who proposed the bill, told WMUR that he feels that it would "create some predictability, some stability."

He pointed to the case of a teenage girl in Canada who committed suicide after being bullied on Facebook. The online bullying continued after her death.

"The family wasn't able to do anything," Sullivan said. "They couldn't go in and delete those comments, and they couldn't take the page down completely."

Facebook currently allows verified immediate family members to submit a special request on the site to remove a family member's Facebook profile after death, but the process requires the deceased's birth certificate, their death certificate and proof that the requestor is the legal executor of the deceased person's estate.

"We will process certain special requests for verified immediate family members, including requests to remove a loved one's account," reads a message on the site. "This will completely remove the timeline and all associated content from Facebook, so no one can view it."

The site says it is their policy to "memorialize the deceased person," but cannot give out any login information for a member's Facebook page after they die.

Yet according to Sullivan, Facebook's current policy is unacceptable.

"[We need to] let the Internet companies know that families have a right to tie up loose ends and get some closure," he said.

Five other states, including Oklahoma, Idaho, Rhode Island, Indiana and Connecticut, have established legislation about how someone's digital footprint should be regulated after their death.

Back in 2010, Ryan Kiesel--a state legislator at the time--sponsored a bill called the Digital Property Management After Death law. But he feels the federal government is the only place where significant change could be seen in the issue of what happens to social networking profiles after a user's death.

"Facebook and other online providers have changed their privacy policies to keep up with the times, but we still see a lot of flux within different sites like Facebook, Flickr, or Google, for example." Kiesel said in an interview with ABC News. "The federal government should pass uniform laws to govern all digital assets because it is quite difficult for an estate to have to navigate endless numbers of digital policies postmortem."

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