‘Digital heir’ ruling debate
IN A landmark ruling, Germany’s highest court has told Facebook to grant a grieving mother access to her late daughter’s account. Citing data protection laws, Facebook had earlier refused to allow the woman access to the profile of her 15-year-old daughter who was killed by a train in Berlin in 2012.
Judges at the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe, Germany, ruled that “parents can inherit the contract between their child and a social media platform in the same way they would be able to inherit physical documents such as diaries and private letters”.
“From an inheritance law view, there is no reason to treat digital content differently,” the ruling said.
There are more than
2 billion people on Facebook, 1.5 billion on WhatsApp, 1 billion on Instagram and 330 million on Twitter.
The ruling has reignited the debate on how to make digital platforms realise the need to transfer digital assets – photos, videos and posts – to the family once a member is no more.
“When someone dies leaving behind his email and social media accounts, the same are movable property and that being so, any heirs of the concerned person can seek right to access the same,” says Pavan Duggal, one of India’s top cyber law experts.
A “digital heir” can preserve those precious moments and gift those to future generations via tools such as an external hard disk, Cloud storage or DVDs.
The said heirs can ask the digital/social media companies to get access after giving the necessary proof.
The ruling has done justice to a grieving woman, but the Indian cyber law has not even touched upon the issue of one’s digital life post-death.
Facebook and WhatsApp each has more than 200 million Indian users. Instagram, according to www.statista.com, has nearly 60 million users in India (as of April this year).
According to statistician Hachem Sadikki from the University of Massachusetts, Facebook will become the world’s biggest virtual graveyard by the end of this century.
This is because there will be more profiles of dead people than of living users.
The social media giants, however, have formulated their own solutions to the problem.
Facebook “memorialises” your account and allows you to choose a “legacy contact”. No one can log into a “memorialised” account.
The “legacy contact” can “manage” your account by adding a pinned post (like a funeral announcement), respond to new friend requests and change the profile picture and cover photo – but nothing beyond that. Google, which owns Gmail, YouTube and Picasa web albums, has an “Inactive Account Manager” feature, which allows a user to nominate who has access to his or her information.
If people don’t log on after a while, their accounts can be deleted or shared with a designated person.
According to Twitter: “In the event of the death of a Twitter user, we can work with a person authorised to act on behalf of the estate or with a verified immediate family member of the deceased to have an account deactivated.”
The site, however, says that “we are unable to provide account access to anyone regardless of his or her relationship to the deceased”.
From the security point of view, one has to safeguard digital impressions in case of death so that they are not used for anti-social purposes.
“Digital signatures/ impressions generally have a validity/expiry date which require a yearly renewal and they are also equipped with a unique combination of passkey so even if someone has the digital signatures they must know the access key to use that,” noted social media analyst Anoop Mishra.
The law is silent on this not just in India but in other countries too.
Several US states have been debating for years the question of whether families can access someone else’s digital assets after they die.
According to the experts, it is imperative that the rights to the digital assets of the dead person be adequately recognised and granted to the relatives of the dead person.
The German ruling has opened a window for other countries to take cognisance and formulate laws that cater to digital inheritance. – IANS