German parents sue Facebook for not granting them access to their dead daughter’s account
A Berlin mother has sued Facebook for not granting them access to their dead daughter’s social media account.
The parents hope to search for answers on whether the death of their child was an accident or not. They want access to the posts and messages their daughter sent on Facebook, which they hope will reveal more about her death.
The girl, who has not been identified, died five years ago, aged 15, when she was run over by an oncoming train at a German subway station.
The trial, which began in a Berlin court on Tuesday, touches on the complicated issue of digital legacy.
No verdict has been passed down yet. Judges gave both parties – the deceased girl’s parents and social media giant Facebook – two weeks to find a solution outside of court, DW reports.
According to the report, a first trial at the Berlin district court in December 2015 was heard and judges had decided in favor of the parents and had ordered Facebook to give them access.
Facebook appealed the decision arguing that the decisions affected other users; too, who had exchanged messages with the girl that they assumed would remain private.
What happens to your social media account when you die?
In 2015, Facebook launched the concept of memorialised pages, which replaced active pages once the user died.
The social network said that once they had been notified of a user’s death, it would ‘memorialise’ the profile and allow the designated trustee to post a message to appear at the top of the timeline as well as respond to new friend requests and change the profile and cover photos.
The parents of the girl allowed her to make a Facebook when she was 14 years old if she shared her password with them.
But when the mother tried to log into her account after she died, it was already memorialised and could no longer be accessed with a login. It is still unclear who prompted the page’s memorialisation, Mail Online reports.
