Global Times

German court allows parents to inherit dead daughter’s FB account

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Germany’s top court ruled Thursday that Facebook should grant a grieving mother access to her dead daughter’s account, in a landmark judgment for how social network data is treated after its owners pass away.

Judges at the Federal Constituti­onal Court in Karlsruhe found that the daughter’s contract with Facebook was part of her legacy and should be passed on to the mother, giving her full access to the daughter’s account including her posts and private messages.

“The contract covering a user account with a social network is transferre­d to the heirs of the original owner of the account,” they said.

Those heirs “have a claim on the network operator for access to the account including communicat­ions data,” the ruling continued.

The mother has battled Facebook through a years-long series of appeals after her 15-year-old daughter was killed by an undergroun­d train in 2012. She hopes the data will shed light on whether the death was an accident or a suicide.

As well as offering emotional closure, court documents show, the informatio­n could clear up whether the train driver is owed compensati­on – as he might be if the daughter did kill herself.

The mother argued the contents of her daughter’s Facebook account are legally identical to a private diary or letters that might be inherited by loved ones after a person’s death.

Judges at the court of first instance in Berlin agreed that the contract between the deceased and Facebook was covered by inheritanc­e law, including the digital content created on the account.

And parents of a minor in any case had a right to know when and with whom their daughter had communicat­ed, they added.

But the Berlin appeals court, in a 2017 decision, backed Facebook’s argument that “privacy in telecommun­ications is guaranteed by Germany’s Basic Law (Constituti­on)” – for the daughter as well as for the people she exchanged messages with.

Now the Constituti­onal Court has found that “a person sending a message can be sure that [Facebook] will only make it available to the account they selected” as recipient of the message.

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