Shawn Wen reports:
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 “memorialized account.” According to the company’s policy at the time, no one could access memorialized accounts, even with a password. After years of lawsuits and appeals, Germany’s highest court in 2018 ordered Facebook to turn over the profile.
The Afterlife of Data (April 11, University of Chicago Press), a slim book by Carl Öhman, an assistant professor of political science at Uppsala University in Sweden, takes on the central question of whether Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc., as well as companies such as Alphabet Inc. and Apple Inc., should have the power to decide what happens to our data after our deaths.
Read more from Bloomberg at MSN.
h/t, Joe Cadillic