With so many things we have in this digital world, a question that always remains is: what happens when I die? Before you think that social networks on the topic, many profiles have been turned into memorials, some were excluded by family and friends who may know the password, or were left in the air, with no updates and no visits.

However, Twitter decided to follow in the footsteps of other social networks like Facebook, and adopted a policy to deal as dead user profiles. According to Mashable, Twitter will enable relatives or friends of the deceased can go to the team a death certificate, requesting the deletion of the profile or the backup of the user’s public tweets.

Besides the certificate, Twitter will also require some information about the requester, such as their relation with the user profile in question, noting that in any way will be given the password to access the account. Who want to include a posthumous message in the profile, for example, need to apply for other methods of access to the profile, such as knowing the user’s password or access through another device that has the password saved in memory.

For Debra Aho Williamson, senior analyst at eMarketer, it is likely that social networks start to offer a variety of options related to user profiles deceased. “In some cases, family members and friends want to keep the person’s profile in social networking even after his/her death, similar to a memorial, but in other cases it [the existence of the profile] can be very painful,” said Williamson according to the MediaPost website.

Via: Mashable.