Berlin: Facebook rejects a mother's request to be allowed to look through her deceased daughter's Facebook messages - is there such a thing as a virtual inheritance?
As 'rbb24' and 'pnn' report, a Berlin mother wants to be allowed to view the Facebook messages of her dead 15-year-old child in order to have exhausted another opportunity to clarify why her daughter died.
The 15-year-old fell under an incoming subway in 2012 and later died in hospital.
The young person's mother is still unclear as to whether it was an accident or suicide and would like to find out using the messages her daughter sent via Facebook.
But Facebook doesn't accommodate the mother. She has been suing the company for years to better understand her child's death.
However, for data protection reasons, Facebook cannot grant the mother access to her deceased daughter's messages.
Legal custody also ends with the death of the child, so this cannot be asserted in court - apart from the question of whether one can inherit the digital content of a Facebook account at all.
Status “Memorial State”
A Facebook friend of the deceased may have notified Facebook that the 15-year-old had died, because since her account was given the status “memorial,” the young person's old password no longer works.
The parents knew their daughter's password because it was a criterion when the then 14-year-old was allowed to use the social media platform.
According to rbb, “Facebook is aware of the tragedy of the case”.
Screenshot mimikama
A Facebook representative explains the position as follows:
The social network's messenger services should be assessed similarly to telephone conversations, to which the Telecommunications Act applies. Content can therefore only be disclosed if the sender and recipient agree. But that didn't happen here. The chat partner’s data also needs to be protected.
She emphasizes that “you don’t want to not give the data out of spite for your mother.” After all, this is about the death of a child.
Court calls for an out-of-court settlement
Both parties try again to reach an amicable agreement, for example by anonymizing the names of the chat partners.
However, if no agreement is reached, the Court of Appeal will announce the verdict on May 30th.
Notes:
1) This content reflects the current state of affairs at the time of publication. The reproduction of individual images, screenshots, embeds or video sequences serves to discuss the topic. 2) Individual contributions were created through the use of machine assistance and were carefully checked by the Mimikama editorial team before publication. ( Reason )