When William showed up as a suggested friend on Facebook I almost clicked on the link. He was an acquaintance. We had friends in common. Then I remembered I had gotten a mail about his memorial service months ago. In the eternal sunshine of Facebook’s mind we could still become friends. There was something simultaneously soothing and creepy about it all.

Others have complained about how a new feature on Facebook tells them to reconnect with friends they haven’t talked to for awhile. Except some of those friends are actually dead.

Now Facebook says dead people won’t show up as suggested friends anymore. But if their friends and family request it, their pages can be preserved for eternity – a sort of virtual memorial.

I wonder who qualifies as friends and family here, who gets the power to preserve someone’s page. Do already-approved friends get precedence here? My mother and my sister are not on Facebook. If something happens to me, do they have the right to demand my page be taken down? Or do one of my Facebook friends (many of whom are really Facebook acquaintances) get precedence?

And how do you prove someone has died? Facebook requires an obituary or a news article. But what if there is neither?

Ashley Gilbertson, who wrote an amazing book about being a war photographer in Iraq once talked about his new project. It was photographing the bedrooms of young soldiers who had died in Iraq. The rooms were frozen in time, preserved by grieving mothers – a jumble of photographs of high school sweethearts, posters of rock stars, college jerseys, sports trophies.

Facebook is creating its own versions of those bedrooms, preserved in Internet ether – messages on the wall, links they had shared, quizzes they had taken (what kind of superhero are you). They are there forever (as long as the storage lasts.)

And their approved friends, a sort of exclusive club, are the only ones allowed to post on their wall. It sounds a little spooky, a sort of online planchette, leaving messages for the beyond on the dead person’s wall. This is not like leaving teddy bears and candles at a memorial shrine. That shrine eventually disappears. The teddy bear gets grubby. The candles melt. But the Facebook shrine never ages, never fades. Can the friends unfriend themselves if it gets too much, trapped in the mausoleum?

It makes me curious what else can happen with the pages of people who died. Facebook says they won’t be searchable anymore. But a report on NPR just talked about how those endless quizzes we take on Facebook actually can allow an application to mine our profiles for all kinds of information – religion, sexual preference, school, groups we belong to etc. All that information can then be sold to marketers. These people won’t know that William has died. He will live forever in their database, memorialized whether he wanted to be or not.

Facebook has really altered our notion of privacy. Work colleagues, lovers, cousins, parents, casual acquaintances you met at a party, members of your book club are suddenly all swimming in the same pool. Some of them might even know each other.

There have already been stories of people posting about playing hooky from work without realizing work colleagues were on it. I went to an event the other day that was rather ridiculous but I stopped myself from posting about it because I knew the organizer was a Facebook friend. I have realized that when I enter the social networking world I am visible in ways I didn’t count on. I am searchable. I have no real privacy even though it gives me the illusion of intimacy. That’s the price I pay for connection.

Now even in death we are not private. Facebook sees dead people.