July 16, 2018 /
On July 12, 2018, the Federal Court of Justice in Karlsruhe ruled in the last instance that a Facebook account created by a deceased person passes to the heirs as part of the estate.
Facebook invokes the secrecy of telecommunications
The lawsuit was brought by the mother of a girl who was hit by a subway train and later died. Facebook did not want to grant the parents of the deceased access to the account and invoked the secrecy of telecommunications and, in this context, the data protection of third parties who could be affected in connection with the Facebook profile of the deceased.
The Federal Court of Justice rejected Facebook’s concerns and based its ruling on the fact that content on a Facebook account is comparable to that of diaries and letters.
The contents of letters and diaries have long been undisputedly considered part of the estate and are indisputably transferred to the heirs as part of the inheritance, regardless of data protection. The judges at the Federal Court of Justice also assumed the same for data on a Facebook profile, as there are no reasonable considerations that justify the unequal treatment of this content, even if it relates to different media. Data protection and telecommunications secrecy are not affected in this respect.
Furthermore, the Senate argued that the use of a Facebook profile is usually a contract of use between Facebook and the account holder. The heirs enter into the rights and obligations of such contracts of use in the same way as they enter into other contractual relationships of the deceased. In this respect, too, there are no reasonable considerations as to why this should no longer apply to a Facebook user agreement.