By Umberto Bacchi
LONDON, Feb 14 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – From photos to personal posts and private messages, social media users leave a long digital trail behind them.
But who owns that data when they die?
With about one in three people worldwide estimated to have a social media account, the question has become more pressing for legal experts and was brought to the fore last week by the family of a deceased teenage girl in Britain.
The parents of Molly Russell, a 14-year-old who committed suicide in 2017, told local media they had been unable to access data on her phone, including her Instagram account, which they said might hold clues to why she took her own life.
“It seems to me that the data on Molly’s phone should have become her parents’ property,” Russell’s father, Ian, told the BBC.
“She died without a will, she was 14 and everything else quite naturally returns to us as her parents and so should her data.”
Instagram declined to comment on the particular case as an inquest is ongoing.
The Facebook-owned social media giant said it is against its policies for someone to log into another person’s account, but it would consider legitimate requests for family members to access information, provided there is a court order.
Britain is among the majority of countries in having no laws on digital inheritance, which makes such cases complicated, said Edina Harbinja, a senior lecturer in media and privacy law at Birmingham’s Aston University.
As most social media accounts are used to send private messages to others, privacy is a key issue, and so are the different legal interpretations of what can be considered transferable property in the digital world, she said.
“There is a complete legal mess there,” Harbinja told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
WHO OWNS MY DATA?
Under the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a landmark privacy law adopted last year, individuals have the right to get a copy of their data held by internet companies, or ask that it be deleted.
But the legislation is no help in inheritance matters, as it applies only to the living, bequeathing no rights to their heirs, said Rowenna Fielding, a data protection expert at British consultancy Protecture.
This is partly because, unlike the United States, the leading legal view in Europe is that personal data is not a type of property and as such cannot be sold or disposed of, legal experts said.
“The only owner of the personal data is the individual,” said Gabriel Voisin, a partner specialising in data protection and privacy at international law firm Bird & Bird.
Personal data refers to any information relating to a person’s identity, like their name, address or religion.
“Organisations may receive this information because I provided them with it … but they are not (the) owners of my name. They are instead what we call ‘custodians’ of the information,” Voisin said.
But not everything people share online is personal data.
Other things, like photos or short compositions, are treated as intellectual property and should pass onto heirs following copyright rules, said Harbinja, a leading expert on post-mortem privacy.
“The problem is how can they access that,” she said.
