The real battle for data privacy begins when you die

Policies on posthumous data are a largely unacknowledged frontier in data privacy, an academic argues. — Unsplash

In 2012 a 15-year-old girl died in Berlin after being hit by a subway train. Her bereaved parents asked Facebook to turn over her private messages in hopes of understanding whether her death was a suicide or an accident.

Facebook refused. Her death had already been reported to the social media site, which then converted her profile to a “memorialised account”. According to the company’s policy at the time, no one could access memorialised accounts, even with a password. After years of lawsuits and appeals, Germany’s highest court in 2018 ordered Facebook to turn over the profile.