Facebook plans to use Artificial Intelligence to determine if a user is dead but his or her contacts keep receiving notifications like birthday reminders.
According to Facebook, a new algorithm will be rolled out in the near future to help tackle notification splash of deceased users on its platform.
The Tech giant company has been receiving numerous complaints from millions of users attributing to receiving notifications from the profiles of dead friends and relatives.
Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg on Tuesday officially announced that the social network will use artificial intelligence to determine when someone has died, and stop sending those kinds of notifications.
According to her, the improved AI will keep the profile of a deceased loved one from appearing in painful ways.
“If an account hasn’t yet been memorialised, we use Artificial intelligence to help keep it from showing up in places that might cause distress, like recommending that person be invited to events or sending a birthday reminder to their friends,” Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Operating Officer at Facebook said in a blog post. In 2015, Facebook introduced a feature that lets people choose a legacy contact – a family member or friend entrusted to care for their Facebook account when they pass away.
Facebook also plans to give more control to legacy contacts so as to be able to change additional settings, such as tags and who can view specific posts in the tributes section of a page.
"Legacy contacts can now moderate the posts shared to the new tributes section by changing tagging settings, removing tags and editing who can post and see posts,” Ms Sandberg explained.
"We've heard from people that memorializing a profile can feel like a big step that not everyone is immediately ready to take," the company says. "That's why it's so important that those closest to the deceased person can decide when to take that step. Now we are only allowing friends and family members to request to have an account memorialized."