Facebook has recently added a feature that displays a company-generated "On this Day" section where one can look back to what they have posted on that particular day n years ago.
The section also shows birthday notifications and holiday reminders, such as Mother's Day which will take place tomorrow, May 8.
This is part of the social network's attempt to encourage people to post more about their personal lives. While this may come as a help for others, it is not a welcomed reminder for some.
For instance, the Mother's Day greeting is something Scarlett Scalzo, a 23-year-old student in Austin would rather not see. She doesn't want to be reminded that her mother has suddenly died last February.
Unfortunately, choosing not to be reminded is close-to-impossible as there is no way to "opt out" of these messages in advance. Although Facebook has taken steps to know when someone has died, through the "memorialize" the profile feature, not everyone is able to meet the standards and requirements of such. Not everyone is even aware that such feature exists.
That is, both you and your mother may have Facebook accounts, but Facebook doesn't have a way of knowing you two are related unless you list your mother as such or she lists you as her daughter. Thus, your Facebook account and hers have to be up-to-date.
According to an article published in Washington Post, "Everybody, at some point, will encounter an online ghost of someone they've lost. Sites that catalog the social media profiles of the dead have been around since before Facebook: MyDeathSpace, the best-known of these, takes its name from MySpace, the social network that Facebook buried years ago. There are message board posts, emails in contact lists and long-uploaded photographs on the Internet that could, without warning, bring back an unwanted memory."
