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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.
"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?
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.
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.
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.
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