Facebook Suggests Dead Friends?

Karl Baehr was a dear friend of mine. He died last year of a heart attack. That was November 13th, 2013. My calendar shows today is December 21st, 2014.

I'm finding it difficult to understand more than one year later after Karl's death, why am I continuing to be prompted to invite dead friends to LIKE a Facebook page?

Can someone please explain this one to me?

I know it's been said that nobody is perfect. But this is not an isolated case.

Several of my high school alumni have died. Vicki was another suggestion that Facebook made to me this morning, too.

That's 2 suggested dead people in just 5 minutes.

FACT: Facebook has a few billion dollars and big enough staff to police and prune off users that have been dead and buried a long time.

The big question for me is: Why don't they?

I'm going to be really shocked if Karl Baehr ever sends me a Facebook message starting off a message with "Hey buddy..." as he always did.

Facebook does indeed have a "death policy." In a nutshell, here's how it works:

When they are notified about a Facebook member's death, their page will be turned into a memorialized page instantly so friends and family can post to their wall.

How long a Facebook's profile and page remains on line after the user dies, is not exactly clear. Several websites and services are out there that claim to help you remove a deceased love one's on-line profiles.

Google will still show Facebook profiles when you search for people. A Google search for Karl Baehr does reveal a link to his obituary. But on the right side of Google, there's no stamp of a PAST tense. It still shows: WORKS AT Emerson College. Not: WORKED AT...

His Albuquerque cell phone # is shown and so does his Boston phone #, too.

In 2012, the Huffington post reported that there were more than 30 million dead people still with active profiles on Facebook.

Fred Wolens is a spokesperson for Facebook. He said they do not know how many memorialized Facebook pages exist.

Which begs the question, when I'm paying for Facebook ads for my company or on behalf of another customer I'm working for, just how many of these ads are showing up on "dead people's walls?"

When I boost a post, or a Facebook page, is it possible that I'm trying to reach 30 million or more dead people?

Is a big chunk of my money being thrown away on advertising on Facebook because my posts are going to dead users' pages? Enquiring minds want to know.

It would be nice to get an answer to that question. And I have asked it. Seven times now. So far, that question is falling on deaf (dead) ears.

A phone call to a friend of mine at the PEW Internet Research revealed that the combined number of dead Facebook users and memorialized pages as of 15 October 2014 could well be over 90 million. And she said that would be a conservative (educated) one.

Evan Caroll, founder of the Website: The Digital Beyond, provides some valuable help for family members that need assistance in removing deceased family member's on-line profiles.

If you want to remove a dead family member's on-line profile from LinkedIn, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, etc., you might want to visit Evan's website sometime.

Going the Facebook route to me, seems a bit too risky. Because the removal process will mean my family member will have to cough up a lot of their personal information. And God only knows where they store that, and when some North Korean group of hacker thugs will get access to that data.

If you you follow Facebook guidelines, you have to provide:

• Birth Certificate of deceased
• Death Certificate of deceased
• Proof that you are a family member, which means you will be providing your driver license, family photos of you and said family member...

Wow. Why does Facebook have to have all of this data?

I'm kinda uncomfortable in giving that kind of burden to my loved ones after I'm gone for a few very good security reasons.

FACT: Facebook now stores millions of members' personal data on servers in the Philippines, India, South America and many countries outside the U.S.. They have 'shoddy privacy policies,' or very different physical (server and data) security laws.

And people wonder why identity theft in America has skyrocketed.

USA Today reported that the number of programs written exclusively designed to steal your identity, bank accounts or credit card information grew from about 1 million in 2007, to over 130 million by 2013.

If you add Facebook's stupid "death clause," removal policy, that number is now 130 million plus one.

Why? Because Facebook wants my family to send scanned copies of the deceased's birth certificate, death certificate (which will often have your SSAN # on them) and my family member's driver license (with their SSAN on them).

Which can turn into a field day for the credit card and identity theft cartels. That kind of headache isn't something I want to burden my family with when I kick the bucket.

This is why I have a "My Online Stuff to Remove" Clause in my will. It's written on a single sheet of paper and it's stored in a bank safety deposit box.

It has all of my logins and passwords to every account I own online.

This way, a family member can delete all my on-line profiles 100% when I die with zero risk to their personal information, and it can be done in a single hour on a Saturday.

As my friend Karl Baehr would say: "Period. End of discussion."