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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.
That's not exactly the gist of the ruling. The court decided against the parents, because the conversations of the deceased daughter contain private information of the people she was talking with, and thus are protected by the Secrecy of correspondence.
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.
In Germany, there are not just "minor" and "adults" before the law, but fine-grained differences are made depending on age, see https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/... for details.
Even childred at the age of 7 have (very limited) rights to do business transactions on their own, and a person at the age of 15 already has a lot of rights.
And just because parents have a tendency to just not believe in mundane causes of death, such as traffic accidents, does not mean the police is incapable of determining whether something was an accident or suicide - especially, when like in this case, lots of witnesses were around and simply not a single indication to suicide was present.
It is not the privacy of the dead girl that is in question but the privacy of her correspondence partners.
That law is the law that forbids to open letters, wiretap phones, disclose private conversations you pick up via radio when you are sailing etc.
It is basically the other side of the free speech laws ... good luck in getting it "damned".
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.