Your death no longer need mean your Facebook account dies with you. A new Facebook policy means your account--like your heart--will go on and on.

Facebook announced it will allow a Facebook account holder to designate a friend or family member to be his Facebook estate executor and manage his account after his death.

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Beginning Feb. 12, a Facebook user in the United States can select "legacy contact" to make one last post on his behalf when he dies. That legacy contact can do many of the things the deceased account holder can so such as update the cover photo and profile and archive the original owner's Facebook posts and photos.

Once Facebook is notified of a death and confirms it, Facebook will add the tagline "Remembering" over the user's name and notify the legacy contact. The legacy contact, however, will not be able to log in as the person that died or view that person's private messages,

The practice today is once informed of the death of an account holder, Facebook first verifies the death and "memorializes" the account. This means the account can be viewed but not be edited. Family or friends can report a death through an electronic form at the online Facebook Help Center.

Facebook has memorialized hundreds of thousands of deceased account holders since the social media site began memorializing pages in 2007.

"We heard from family members who wanted to post funeral information or download and preserve photos," said Facebook product manager Vanessa Callison-Burch. "We realized there was more we could do."

It's been a challenge for families of deceased account holders of how to dispose of the "digital personal effects" of a family member. Less than a dozen U.S. states have laws governing authority over digital assets.

A recent poll of 1,012 adults found that 71 percent want online communications to remain private unless they gave prior consent. Another 43 percent want their private accounts on online services deleted unless they have given prior consent for someone to access them.

Facebook's 186 million users in the United States can go to Settings to choose a legacy contact to manage the account. If not, they can either choose to have the account deleted permanently after death or do nothing.