1.78m Dead Facebook Users In 2011 Adding To Profile Clutter

1.78m Facebook users are likely to die during 2011, though don't worry: the social network itself isn't killing people off. Instead, that's the user-churn predicted by Entrustet, a digital-legacy planning firm, which has bashed Facebook's user stats with death rates from the Center for Disease Control and decided that the site will be littered with profiles for ex-networkers by the end of the year.

Of that 1.78m, 480,000 are expected to be in the US. Entrustet is also predicting the number is only going to rise, and that duplicate accounts will increasingly become an issue; their figures suggest that an unlikely 150-percent of 20- to 24-year-olds in the US are on Facebook.

For its part, Facebook offers a "memorializing" system where relatives of deceased members can have the profiles frozen; alternatively, the site will remove profiles of the deceased on request. A new move is to mark all members who have not logged in within the past thirty days as "inactive", though this seems more to better educate its own usage figures than to handle unwanted profiles.

[via CNN]