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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?
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.
It's not the right of privacy of the daughter, that the ruling was about, it's the right of privacy of the people she was talking to (probably mostly other minors the parents of the daughter were not legal wardens of). And those conversations thus are protected by the Secrecy of correspondence.
And that is wrong from a legal point of view in Germany. There are stages at which people get legal autonomy. For example, at 14 they get religious autonomy and their parents from that time have no legal authority anymore about that question. For example, at 14 you can legally exit a church on your own say-so. People also get economic decision power to some degree at different ages and can do binding contracts up to certain amounts and of certain natures. And no, their stuff does not belong to their parents when it was legally acquired by them.
Yours is also a hugely immoral stance as you basically advocate that children are their parents property. I find that idea quite repulsive.
Incidentally, "privacy" is a human right and applies to anybody being recognized as human. It can only be limited because circumstances force that, e.g. for a toddler. But somebody 15 years of age certainly has that human right mostly in its full form.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
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.