They predict that Facebook will be a virtual cemetery by 2070: there will be more dead than alive users

A study from the Oxford Internet Institute showed that by 2070 there will be more Facebook accounts of dead that of life, with what the social network could become a ghostly join (or one of the zombies).

"Are the dead taking control of Facebook?", Asked researchers at the Oxford University-based institute in the United Kingdom. Their conclusion so far is that at least 1.4 billion Facebook users will die before 2100.

The year that will pause will be 2070, when the number of accounts of deceased persons could exceed that of people "alive".

Facebook has more than 2,300 million active users per month and, if it continues to grow at a pace as fast as it currently knows, it could reach 4,900 million by the end of the century.

"Never before in history, such a vast archive of cultures and human behaviors had been concentrated in one place," explained David Watson, one of the developers of the company. study, in the Big Data & Society magazine.

Another of the authors of the study, Carl Öhman, pointed out how the data transmitted by each user will be processed once the person dies.

"These statistics raise new and difficult questions about who is entitled to all this data, how they should be managed in relation to the interests of the families and friends of the deceased and its use by future historians to understand the past", agreed Öhman.

"Controlling this file will be, in a sense, control our history. Therefore, it is important to ensure that access to this historical data is not limited to a single for-profit corporation, "Watson said.

The team is already talking about the "digital heritage" that future generations will have – or not – at your disposal to understand how your ancestors lived, in the same way that we enter today in a library of newspapers.

Currently, Facebook has "memorial accounts" for deceased people, who are those designated by a contact and appears with the caption "In memory of" next to the profile name.

The designated contact may decide that the deceased's account becomes "commemorative" or that it is permanently deleted from the social network.