Appointing A Person For Your Facebook Legacy
Social media accounts facilitate connections between individuals from all around the world. They also make it easier to keep in touch with friends and family – even those close to home. As integral as these tools are for many people’s daily lives, it can nonetheless be easy to leave them out of account in the estate planning process. Just like any other type of account, however, these digital records need due consideration and a clear plan of action for how each should be handled. Setting up a Facebook legacy contact to take charge of how your presence on that platform should be maintained after you are gone is just one step toward a comprehensive digital estate plan. Contact a member of the Boca Raton estate planning team at Loughlin Law, P.A. to discuss a digital estate planning strategy that complements your offline legacy.
What Is a Legacy Contact on Facebook?
Facebook allows individuals who own user accounts to set up memorialization preferences for their “main” profiles (usually the profile that is automatically created when a new user signs up for their first account). A Facebook legacy contact is the person selected to manage the memorialized profile after the original account owner has passed away. For many people with active social media accounts, setting up a Facebook legacy contact is an integral part of their digital estate planning.
Memorialization of Facebook Profiles
Memorialization is one of two options a Facebook user can select to determine how their main profile and its associated account information will be handled once they have passed away. The other option is permanent deletion, according to Facebook. Permanent deletion is the only option for “additional” profiles linked to a single user (as of August 2025, Facebook allows each user to maintain up to four distinct profiles; only one is the “main” profile required for an account).
Pros and Cons of Memorialization for Facebook Legacy
As is so often the case in digital estate planning, the pros and cons of memorializing a user profile and setting up a Facebook legacy contact to manage the memorial page are closely linked, and based generally on the same features of how the platform works. Given that Facebook was developed initially as a social networking site, it should be no surprise that the benefits of Facebook memorialization and a Facebook legacy contact relate primarily to the social ties that are broken when an account owner dies, and the social connections that often remain between the people who knew the person when they were still alive. The potential detractions, meanwhile, stem from the security vulnerabilities of a digital platform, in combination with the privacy concerns raised by any form of social sharing.
Facebook Legacy: Pros
Naming a Facebook legacy contact and choosing memorialization for your profile leaves your digital legacy in trusted hands. Your Facebook legacy contact can post your funeral details for friends who might otherwise wait weeks or months before learning of your death through other channels. They can create threads for friends and family members to share their favorite recollections and bid a fond farewell.
Benefits to Friends, Family, and Charitable Concerns
Often these experiences of sharing and celebrating a person’s life together can be highly valued by the loved ones we leave behind. A memorialized page can also be a good place for a Facebook legacy contact to name your favorite charities or cherished causes, so that you continue drawing attention to the issues that mattered to you, even after you are gone. This type of memorial can sometimes be even more effective when used in conjunction with other estate planning tools, so consider discussing your options with a member of the Florida estate planning team at Loughlin Law, P.A. to develop a cohesive plan.
Leaving a Creative Legacy
Selecting memorialization also means a chance to keep whatever content an individual may have publicly posted available to inform or entertain, as well as to leave behind a record of their thoughts and the way they approached the world. Even if an individual preparing a digital estate plan leaves instructions for their Facebook legacy contact to eventually delete most or all of the content stored under the profile, often the account owner may trust the person named as a legacy contact to take care of that task much more fully than they might feel comfortable trusting Facebook or its parent company with this aspect of digital estate planning – particularly since Facebook’s promise of permanent deletion is contingent upon the company becoming aware of the individual’s death.
Facebook Memorialization: Cons
On one level, nobody is ever able to control all the things other people will think and say about them when they are not present to defend themselves or set the record straight – whether that absence is because the person has passed away or because they have stepped out of the room. In this sense, a memorialization poses no greater risk to a deceased person’s reputation than does the guestbook at a funeral.
Digital Memorial Maintenance
On the other hand, physical guestbooks do not allow guests to include malicious links with their signatures. Unlike a memorial page, as well, a bound guestbook requires no further maintenance once the funeral is over and the guestbook has been packed away. Once your profile has been memorialized, however, it can potentially require maintenance – though often not very intensive – from the Facebook legacy contact for as long as it remains on Meta’s servers.
Digital Security
In addition, digital data handling and commerce both have volatile histories. As long as the personal information associated with your account is stored by Facebook, it is inherently vulnerable to any hack that compromises Facebook’s own security. You may be able to mitigate some of the risks by setting up encryption preferences for the Meta services that offer them, while you are still alive, but keep in mind that every system has some vulnerabilities, and you may not be able to anticipate all of the technological developments that emerge after you are gone.
Moreover, theft is not the only potential path to appropriation of your user data. Meta already sells aggregated information on user behavior for the purpose of advertising, and the $5 billion settlement Facebook reached with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in 2019 for charges related to violations of consumer privacy in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal provided some evidence that the company might not always treat users’ information with the care that many felt it should. Meta Platforms, Inc. – the parent company that owns Facebook and Instagram (among other social networking services – could itself change hands, transferring user data to another party under terms that the deceased owner of a memorialized account would be in no position to evaluate and consent to personally. All of these are legitimate concerns that can reasonably give an individual pause regarding whether to include a Facebook legacy contact in their digital estate plan.
How Do I Activate Facebook Legacy?
If you feel the benefits of having your main profile memorialized outweigh the potential drawbacks, then you can follow Facebook’s instructions to choose memorialization, rather than permanent account deletion, and then name a legacy contact. Your Facebook legacy contact will need to be someone who already has a Facebook account at the time when you are setting up the memorialization preferences; this might mean that the personal representative designated to carry out the probate of your estate under Florida Rev. Stat. § 733.602 is not eligible, particularly if your Last Will and Testament nominates a bank or trust company, rather than an individual, to be the personal representative of your estate, as described by the Florida Bar Association.
Selecting someone other than the personal representative named in your Will to be a Facebook legacy contact is perfectly acceptable, but you may wish to also use the Will to include specific instructions for the legacy contact, particularly if you would like the person to download any of your stored account information. Beyond an active Facebook account of their own, look for qualities in a Facebook legacy contact that align with those you might want in a personal representative or power of attorney: someone you trust, who knows you well and will take care to honor your wishes for the memorialized account.
Discuss Your Digital Estate Planning Concerns With a Florida Estate Planning Lawyer
Managing the digital traces we leave behind has become an integral part of estate planning for many Floridians. The digital estate planning process should be undertaken with care and consideration similar to that applied to banking accounts and the designation of physical property for beneficiaries. The mechanisms of access and account management, however, may differ considerably. Setting up a Facebook legacy contact is only one aspect of preparing a digital estate plan. Contact a Florida estate planning attorney with Loughlin Law, P.A. to discuss strategies for integrating Facebook legacy planning with your other estate planning tools. You can reach our Boca Raton office by calling 561-559-6214 today.
