Facebook keeps asking me to wish dead people “Happy Birthday”

Two of my friends have died in the last three years. By coincidence, both of their birthdays are in early July, so Facebook reminded me twice this week to text “Happy Birthday” to two people who will never respond.

Facebook’s algorithms can’t comprehend death. All they know is that there was a time when I was often tagged in photos with these people and we interacted on each other’s posts. If Facebook’s algorithm has incentives to increase engagement, why doesn’t it get me to post on a friend’s timeline by reminding me that it’s their birthday?

We leave a massive footprint on the internet these days. When Jamie died, I coped by combing through our digital trash. We were both writers, so we wrote to each other often. I would scroll through our iMessage history, getting mad at myself for setting my messages to automatically delete after a year. I wanted more of that mundanity—the detailed discussions about graduate school applications, the Gossip Girl memes, the screenshots of poems I’d written in the Notes app. I wanted proof that our friendship was important enough that I could be so overwhelmed with grief, because for some reason I needed permission to be sad.

Unlike iMessage, my message history on Facebook has never been deleted. I try to imagine what my own fifteen years of Facebook data looks like, stored in a warehouse somewhere in California and then duplicated for billions of other Facebook users to see. How much storage, money and processing power does Facebook need to ensure I can find a meme a deceased friend sent me in 2017?

I have never been more grateful to Mark Zuckerberg than in the days following Jamie’s death. But this infinite storage is an accidental gift. Facebook’s real answer to the inconvenience of death was to develop a system for remembering our profiles. We used to decide whether we wanted to be buried, cremated, or become something else entirely – today we also decide whether we want a legacy contact to monitor our Facebook account or whether our accounts should be deleted after we die.

Facebook introduced the Successor Contact feature in 2015. If you’re still alive, you can name a loved one as your “Successor Contact” and transfer control of your account after you die. If you do, your account will be memorialized, with “In Memory” displayed next to the name on your profile. Once an account is memorialized, your Successor Contact won’t be able to remove content or view your messages, but they can change your profile picture and cover photo, write a pinned post on your timeline, and respond to friend requests. If you don’t select a Successor Contact while you’re alive, a loved one can work with Facebook to receive that honor after you die. And if your account is memorialized, Facebook won’t recommend your friends wish you a happy birthday.

Even in my dreams, my friends don’t come to life. I dreamed that Ellie messaged me on Facebook, but it was one of those old-fashioned tricks where someone sends you a bit.ly link and says “OMG, just saw this crazy video, is that you??”

This dream was based on a real fear of our online afterlife. As if there wasn’t enough to do when someone dies, now we have to take care of their digital affairs as well. On Reddit, people are asking how to access a loved one’s computer without a password. Meanwhile, the New York Department of State is advising consumers to protect themselves from identity theft after death; if someone gets their hands on a deceased person’s Social Security number, they may be able to open credit cards, file taxes, and take out loans under their name.

There’s no right way to bury a social media profile. It’s not a person, but a two-dimensional projection of who a person was. These social media profiles feel so removed from the core of our humanity that we resist the urge to mark the end of our digital lives. Yet while we’re alive, our online lives are so all-encompassing that we need to set screen time limits on our phones so we spend less time in the digital world. It’s uncomfortable to think about what we leave behind online when we die, but it’s a remiss not to plan for our digital afterlife if we even have the luxury of planning our deaths.

None of my friends’ families have chosen to “immortalize” their children’s stories, perhaps because it seems so pointless to them in a time of overwhelming grief. Or perhaps they just don’t know it’s an option.

So Facebook will continue to tell me to celebrate the birthdays of my dead friends, even though I know they never lived past their mid-twenties. But if I had to choose, I wouldn’t want to add my friends’ accounts to memorialize others. It’s just more proof that they really died.