Facebook: there are signs when someone might be dead

[hoodoof]

I got a cheery text message yesterday from Facebook.

It told me it was the birthday of someone I know, and all I had to do was reply with "1" to post a birthday wish on their timeline.

Great suggestion but that person died over two years ago and I don't think their relatives would understand if I posted "Happy Birthday" to their timeline.

Facebook: if you summon up that incredible workforce of software engineers, apply all your big data tools, get the best computer scientists on it, you might be able to figure out that there are signs that someone might possibly have died. If someone is in the "might have died" category, don't sent messages asking people to wish them happy birthday.

[sandworm101]

From facebook's perspective, what would the signs be? Not logging in for days/months/years probably isn't enough. Age might not help (I've told countless websites that I am 100+). Even searches tied to obituaries would yield countless false positives for deaths.

Imagine if the Facebook robot thought you were dead, then asked you to confirm. "Login to your account or we will announce your death to all of your friends."

[YogeeKnows → sandworm101]

I think there would be lot of RIP messages on his/her wall. That can be used as a starting point.

[ljk]

> It told me it was the birthday of someone I know, and all I had to do was reply with "1" to post a birthday wish on their timeline.

Now I wonder how many people who actually wrote out the happy birthday message instead of just replied with a "1", seems kind of insincere..

[detaro]

Accounts of dead people shouldn't be active but "memorialized", that's something that has to be requested by people close to the deceased though.