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.

Comments

the parents' rights expire when she does

[turkeydance]

but her rights remain?

Re:the parents' rights expire when she does

[by (1706743)]

I call it pretty damned cold-hearted. If that's what you want from your government, welcome to it.

But, unless I'm misunderstanding the issue, this is also a privacy issue for the deceased's friends. The deceased could very well have had conversations with her peers, conversations which no one wanted the parents to find out about. Facebook has a lot of bi-directional communication, so access to her account = access to things potentially said to her in confidence.

Re:the parents' rights expire when she does

[AmiMoJo]

At age 15 it's unlikely that her parents could demand access to her Facebook account even if she were alive. Privacy rules in Germany apply to children as well, with more and more allowance for parents the younger they are.

The age of consent is 14 in Germany. At age 15 she already had a lot of responsibility and privacy under German law.

Re:Minors can enter into a legal agreement?

[gweihir]

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.