A memorial QR code on a public headstone can be scanned by any stranger who walks past. Most families never think about that until after the plaque is fitted, and for most of them it turns out not to matter. For some it matters a great deal.
This covers the decisions worth making deliberately.
The three settings
Public and indexed. Anyone can read it, and it can appear in Google results for the person's name. Right for a bench, or where the family actively wants the person found, for instance by distant relatives researching family history.
Unlisted. Anyone with the link can read it, but search engines are asked not to list it. The sensible default for most families, and what most people picture when they say "private".
Private. A password or an invitation is required. Right where there is any safeguarding concern, or where the family simply wants it kept close.
Understand what unlisted really means: it is unlisted, not secret. Anyone who scans the plaque can read it, and anyone who is sent the link can forward it. If content genuinely must not be seen by a particular person, unlisted is not sufficient. Use private.
Do you want them to appear in Google?
Worth an actual decision rather than a default.
Reasons to be indexed: old friends who lost touch can find it; distant family researching a name can find it; people who missed the funeral and only heard later can find it. Genealogy is a real and underrated benefit, and in fifty years an indexed page may be the only substantial record of the person that exists.
Reasons not to be: the family finds it exposing; there are living people named on the page who did not choose to be; or the circumstances of the death are the kind of thing that attracts attention.
You can change this later, but not perfectly. Once indexed, a page can be removed from results but may persist in caches and archives for some time. Starting unlisted and opening up later is easier than the reverse.
Does data protection law apply?
A question we get often, and the answer is counterintuitive.
UK data protection law does not cover the dead. Personal data under the UK GDPR and Data Protection Act 2018 means data about living individuals. A deceased person has no data protection rights, and their family cannot exercise any on their behalf.
But the page is full of living people. Photographs of grandchildren. Names of surviving relatives. Memories written by friends, which are that friend's personal data as much as the deceased's. Comments identifying people. All of that concerns living individuals, and all of it is covered.
In practice, for a family memorial page this is a matter of courtesy rather than compliance, since purely personal and household activity is largely outside the regime's scope. But the courtesy is the point: ask before publishing recognisable photographs of other people's children, and remove anything a living person asks you to remove. That last one is worth treating as an absolute rule. It is never worth the argument.
The fraud risk nobody mentions
This is the most concrete harm on this page and it is entirely avoidable.
Identity fraud against recently deceased people is an established problem. Accounts often stay open for months, credit can be applied for in a dead person's name, and it frequently goes undetected because nobody is checking their statements.
Now consider a typical memorial page: full date of birth, place of birth, mother's maiden name in the family section, the schools they attended, their address, the name of the dog. That is not a biography. That is a completed set of security questions, published openly and linked from a plaque bearing their full name.
Practical fixes, none of which cost anything meaningful:
- Use years, not full dates. "1938 to 2025" is a memorial. "Born 14 March 1938" is a data point.
- Leave off the home address. Particularly while the property stands empty, which is separately a burglary risk.
- Be careful with mother's maiden name. The classic memorial overshare, and still a live security question at many institutions.
- Think before naming first schools and first pets. Charming details, and also the two most common security questions in existence.
- Register with the bereavement preference service and notify credit reference agencies, which is worth doing regardless of any memorial page.
You can write warmly about somebody without publishing their security questionnaire. There is more on this in what to include on a memorial page.
The safeguarding case
Rare, serious, and almost never mentioned by anyone selling memorial products.
Where a family member has fled domestic abuse, a public memorial page can leak more than anyone intends. Funeral location, the cemetery, photographs with identifiable backgrounds, comments naming a town, the list of who attended. Somebody who is being avoided knows the death will draw the family together and knows where to look.
If that applies to anyone in the family, the page should be private from the outset, not unlisted, and it should not carry location detail or attendance lists. Ask the person concerned what they need rather than deciding for them, and if you are not sure, a domestic abuse charity will advise. Refuge and Women's Aid both do.
The same logic applies more mildly to estrangement generally. A public page is readable by the relative nobody wants reading it.
Reading versus writing
Two separate permissions, and conflating them causes most of the trouble.
A page where anyone can read but only approved people can add is the arrangement that survives longest without incident. Open contribution is wonderful in the first months, when it gathers memories nobody in the family had, and it is the setting that occasionally admits something a family did not want on their mother's memorial.
A reasonable middle course is open contribution with approval before anything appears. It keeps the benefit and removes the risk, at the cost of somebody checking a queue.
Every memorial plaque with memory page we sell lets you set both of these, and change them at any time afterwards.
Who holds the keys when you die
The question that determines whether the page survives its second generation.
If one person set the page up and only that person can edit it, then when they die the page becomes frozen. Nobody can add, correct or export anything, and in time nobody can prove it belongs to the family at all.
Three things prevent it, and they take ten minutes:
- Name a second editor now, ideally a generation younger.
- Write the login details down with the will, or in whatever the household uses for passwords.
- Keep an exported copy of the photographs and text on something the family controls, so the material survives even if the account does not.
A printed copy settles it permanently, because a book on a shelf has no password and no owner problem.
A short checklist
- Chosen public, unlisted or private deliberately
- Decided about search engine indexing
- Years rather than full dates of birth
- No home address, no mother's maiden name
- Asked before publishing photographs of other people's children
- Checked whether anyone in the family has a safety reason for privacy
- Contributions moderated before they appear
- A second editor named, and details written down
- An exported copy held by the family
Ten minutes, once, and none of it makes the memorial any less warm.