The Super-Depressing New Facebook Feature That Is Absolutely Essential

Facebook's new feature asks: Who do you trust more than anyone in the world? It also has us thinking: Can we be trusted with our own accounts?

Facebook has earned plenty of flak recently for increasingly questionable activities: obscuring our ability to edit privacy settings; not being vigilant enough in preventing hate speech; letting mums across the world sign up with absolutely no warning for children.

Finally comes a feature that is both welcome and essential. Too bad even talking about it is a major bummer.

In a post to their Newsroom, Facebook unveiled a new feature that allows members to ‘Add a Legacy Contact’. Meaning? You can now choose someone to take over your profile page after you die.

Now, unless the singularity happens and we all become immortal (and I’m not saying it won’t), for now, the sad fact remains that our time on this earthly plane is limited.

Prior to Facebook instituting the Legacy Contact feature, the pages of the recently deceased just kind of… hung around.

Unless your nearest and dearest had your login details, your content would remain online from now until infinity (or, more likely, whenever Facebook faded into the ether, which is probably going to be sooner than infinity).

But what if your family and friends did have your Facebook login? Should they delete your posts, or even deactivate your account, rendering invisible your online identity? Or do they leave it up, embarrassing photographs and all?

This new feature allows users to turn the profiles of the dearly departed into proper memorials, allowing people to share fond memories and offer condolences. Best of all: only someone you trust with preserving your online presence gets to choose what remains public, and what remains private.

It’s no fun having to think about a time when we’re not around – it is, after all, the ultimate FOMO – but Facebook’s new feature should get us thinking about the persona we craft for the world through social media.

What people will see when we’re long gone is one thing; what prospective employers see when they’re doing a basic Google search is quite another.

If you’re afraid of what people will find on your Facebook page after you’ve died, you might want to reconsider what you have up when you’re still around to feel the consequences.

That doesn’t mean you should hide your true self; your personality, taste, sense of humour and wonderful idiosyncrasies are precisely what make social media profiles invaluable sketches of who we are as human beings.

But if the thought of potential bosses, current teachers, or even Facebook-stalking mothers seeing that compromising photo you just posted terrifies you, maybe delete it now while you still have the chance.