Facebook ban on tragic girl’s parents

THE parents of a 15-year-old girl who died in a suspected suicide have been barred from accessing her Facebook messages.

The family wanted to look through her posts and chats on the social network to see if she was bullied before she was killed by a train.

Facebook has fiercely resisted handing over the information, claiming it has to protect the privacy of the other users the German girl was chatting with.

Desperate for insight into their daughter’s death, the girl’s parents took the technology giant to court, trying to force it to give them access. They were victorious the first time the case was heard.

A German court ruled the parents should have free access to the content because the girl’s Facebook account is like letters and diaries, which ‘can be inherited regardless of their content’.

But now that ruling has been overturned. An appeals court said yesterday that Facebook’s contract was with the girl rather than her parents, and that it ended with her death in 2012.

The teenager’s parents are weighing up whether to launch a further appeal.

However, the court ruling will fuel outrage over Facebook’s approach to young users. The social media company allows teenagers to sign up for their accounts from the age of 13, where they can freely access shocking pages promoting eating disorders and sexualised images.

And, as disclosed by the Daily Mail earlier this month, children can also access explicit pornography and pages promoting gambling websites, despite the fact this is supposedly against the network’s rules.

Facebook welcomed the ruling yesterday, but added it was ‘sympathetic towards the family’ of the girl. It said: ‘We’re making every effort to find a solution which helps the family at the same time as protecting the privacy of third parties who are also affected.’