What happens to your Facebook profile when you die?

You’ve written your life large on Facebook: Your politics, religion, family, likes, dislikes, some of your best moments, and, one hopes, only a few of your worst. And your cat is there, of course.

What happens when you die? In fact, longtime users today might have more than one Facebook friend who has passed away while their page lives long after them. What if you don’t want to be on Facebook for eternity? What if you do? Who decides?

You can. According to Facebook, there are two main ways to handle this unfortunate circumstance, but they require a so-called Legacy Contact to make the changes you want. Much like a will, you must designate this person before you die, which will give your contact limited access to certain features of your account.

To help preserve their memory, Facebook allows accounts to be placed into a memorial mode. In this mode, the word Remembering will be placed next to the person’s name as a memorial. From that point, privacy settings can be changed to allow friends (or even deleted friends) to share memories on a personal timeline only visible to them. Any photos and posts from the past will stay visible exactly as they were before the person’s death.

To achieve complete privacy, Facebook also gives the Legacy Contact the ability to permanently delete the deceased’s account so that there will be no opportunity for anyone to see old pictures and posts.

Whichever method you choose, you have to designate a legacy contact to avoid having unnecessary complications when attempting to protect a loved one’s account.