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Parents Have No Right To Dead Child's Facebook Account, German Court Rules (reuters.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: A German court rejected a mother's demand on Wednesday that Facebook grant her access to her deceased daughter's account. In the ruling, which overturned a lower court's decision, the Berlin appeals court said the right to private telecommunications extended to electronic communication that was meant only for the eyes of certain people. In the Facebook case, the mother of a 15-year-old who was hit and killed by a subway train in Berlin in 2012 had sought access to her daughter's account to search for clues as to whether the girl had committed suicide. Facebook had refused access to the account, which had been memorialized, meaning it was effectively locked and served as a message board for friends and family to share memories. A regional court in Berlin had ruled in favor of the mother in late 2015, saying that the daughter's contract with Facebook passed to her parents according to German laws on inheritance. It had also said that the girl's right to privacy was not protected because she was a minor and it was up to her parents to protect her rights. The appeals court said on Wednesday that the right to private telecommunications outweighed the right to inheritance, and that the parents' obligation to protect their daughter's rights expired with her death.
but her rights remain?
I'm not sure about German laws on this topic, but it seems to me that most nations consider the age of 15 to be a minor and that their legal guardians have total control of their possessions, including accounts of this nature. Rights of privacy wouldn't kick in until they are a legal adult.
I'm sure others will know more about this than me. I'm just starting the conversation...
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
The appeals court said on Wednesday that the right to private telecommunications outweighed the right to inheritance
The already dead have no personal rights! Only their survivors have rights.
As for parental rights.... most of what the Child would have had in terms of possessions, online accounts, etc. would be the parent's property,
since children are not usually capable of acquiring their own computers, Etc, they use property purchased by the parent, under mutually agreed conditions.
There's nothing to inherit, if the Parent held title to all property and accounts in the first place.
and that the parents' obligation to protect their daughter's rights expired with her death.
What rights? Again, the dead have no ability to assert personal rights, and no rights to be protected.
Only their survivors have rights, which are theirs, and not the dead person's.
This is a German court, which has no jurisdiction in the US...
It seems to me like what the courts actually decided is that, when your child dies, Facebook has more rights to their personal property than you do.
This is a German court, which has no jurisdiction in the US...
However, this not over (if the parents wish to continue to pursue this) as there further courts to appeal to.
It is an interesting case. I do not see any strong agreement as to what the *right* answer should be. However, based on past practice, if the child had kept a private diary, which was common in BF (Before Facebook) times, the diary would have been considered property and transferred to the parents to open and read at will (even in Germany). I guess private diaries (and unpublished manuscripts and work by artists, scientists, etc.) should now be burned at death?
"to search for clues as to whether the girl had committed suicide." If that is the case, then shouldn't that be the domain of law enforcement?
would have been quicker and easier.
Stupid
Unless the government wants access then everything should be open to them.
Especially if you're saying things the government doesn't like.
Your claims of interest in your own child's death are so trite, don't you see? You have no right to anything in such a case.
But that's only because we, the omniscient government, care so very much about you and your privacy. Do you understand now?
Now how many fingers am I holding up, Winston?
This is a German court, which has no jurisdiction in the US...
The ruling is about a German citizen, on Facebook, which does have a commercial presence and operations in Germany and is thus subject to German law.
No need to hunt down your murderer.
you bet your ass I would want them to have access to it.
You are perfectly free to make that choice. The decision does not remove your right to do so. However, you do not have the right to force that decision on this girl, who made a different choice.
As long as a child is minor, no one has any right to prevent his/her parent to know what's going on in their life. This is one of the most non-sense judgement I have seen in recent days !
When your child dies, then the living people who communicated with your child retain their right of communication privacy, and your curiousity as a parent does not quite outweigh that right.
Imagine how pissed you would be if your girl-friend is run over by a truck and immediately afterwards, her parents are starting to read (and possibly circulate) all the juicy details of your prior conversations.
Most teenagers hate their parents, so I doubt they'll be leaving anything constructive in their wills.
The case is not about the privacy of the girl, the case is about the privacy of the people the girl talked to. If Facebook gave access to the girl's account to the parents, they would be able to also see the other side of the conversation.
so, gedankenexperiment... what if this hypothetical diary had been given to a friend for safe keeping,say the day before the child died. to whom does ownership of the diary fall? does the answer change if the parents, or friends parents, don't know about it?
Was this judge paid off or just pathologically incompetent?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
It's not really a legal issue but the very sad case of a mother unwilling to let go of her child and what remains of the child's life.
I'm a father and I think I'd probably struggle to let go of anything of a life that I had created, loved and cared for.
A virtual online persona, in this case, has become the bedroom of the deceased that the mother wants to lock, preserve and occasionally visit when the grieving gets tough.
If, like someone else commented, she had the password for the account she's almost certainly already been through it looking for answers.
Some very good insightful comments on here from others about needing to protect the privacy of the living who were friends.
Still my heart goes out to the family.
Maybe it's just me, but I've been seeing this theme popping up over and over again over the last couple of weeks, seemingly starting with the FB fined for running afoul of privacy laws..... I bet FB has some of the highest paid, and most effective PR people on the planet.
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
It's been patently obvious since the earliest days of facebook that shit like this was inevitable. This is why I never joined. This is why I freaked out when family members allowed facebook to scan their contact lists which include my email address and phone numbers. And this is also why I bought some facebook stock right after the IPO. Keep that gravy train rolling, suckers.
Yes, it is messed up, it should either:
- Parents become legal owners of the account and do what they please
- Nobody "owns" the account and therefore FB MUST delete all of it
What else can it be that is not a big brother FB looming over you ?
So, if their daughter had a diary that had a lock on it, they would be barred from ever opening it? It seems strange that a dead minor has more rights to something than her parents do.
Actually it is even narrower than that. It is a court of the state of Berlin and since Germany uses civil law, any court of any other state can decide differently in a similar case. The decision can also be overturned by the federal court of justice and might even go to the constitutional court, and the judge was well aware of it.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
One of the fundamental tenets of Social Communism (the modern version of Socialism) is that children are not the ward of their parents, but rather of the State, and that parents are merely guardians over children on behalf of the State.
This is becoming more and more of a reality everywhere, including in the United States, where just over the last 50 years, parents have basically been stripped by the courts of all of their parental rights. The State (via the school system) can now punish your child for activities they do at home, and (via other government offices) can take them away from you on a whim if they think that you might have done something wrong, like discipline them, or yell at them, or make them feel bad, or even make them do chores or clean their room.
I got my kids out of public school when I got "the letter." "It has come to our attention..." My kid had brought two apples to school in his lunch, which violated strict school lunch guidelines. Mind you, this wasn't for any reason related to nutrition. It simply meant he had two pieces of fruit while other kids only had one. This was fundamentally unfair, and was basically my kid showing off his "white privilege" by having "excess" compared to other kids.
They were in private school for a year until it was shut down by the State after the public school superintendent filed an "anonymous" complaint about safety issues at the private school (that "anonymous" complaint was later outed). Building inspectors descended on the school and found a small handful of minor code violations and revoked all the permits.
This is how socialism and gestapo tactics work, folks. The EU and the US are merely a few decades behind the Bolivarian Socialist Republics in their level of failure and corruption. But, it's coming. Make no mistake.
Fuck you, racist scum.
NOT their RIGHT to protect their daughter's right .
So YES they have the right and this courtdecision is totally WRONG.
why hasn't law enforcement gotten involved? It beggars belief that, if suicide was a real concern, they couldn't easily get access.
it wasn't really an account owned by the daughter. the info in it all belongs to Facebook, the systems, Facebook. the ultimate control of the account, whether to keep or even eliminate, Facebook. All technically she was doing was "borrowing" storage space and communications lines.
any pretense or belief a user "owns" anything they put in Facebook needs to be eliminated. Facebook owns the user.