Deceased users may outnumber Facebook

Oxford University researchers have done a statistical study of people who use Facebook and have come to the conclusion that, given the site's current base, in 50 years the social network will have more deceased users than live users. The research took into consideration the common life cycle, with parameters linked to the mortality rate of countries whose population has active accounts on the site.

The idea of ​​the Oxford researchers was to try to project how our digital heritage will be treated in the future and how our data will be used after we die. The study finds that if the social network gets frozen and no one else signs up, the number of deceased users will outnumber the living by 2070, as 1.4 billion people using Facebook today must die before 2100.

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David Watson, one of the authors of the review, commented on the ScienceDaily publication that he believes it is critical to ensure that access to historical data, such as the digital heritage of social network users, is not limited to one company, and it is important that this information is available. for future generations. Basically, in the eventual closure of Facebook, a whole online life created by people can simply disappear from the internet.

Researchers do not yet have a final solution to the problem, but they believe sites like Facebook can work with historians, archivists and ethics experts to try to assemble a process of data curation and preserve the memory of their users.

Deceased users can outnumber Facebook on TecMundo