survey commissioned by WEB.DE and GMX would sue online services for the release of deceased individuals' data. Now, the German Federal Court of Justice (BGH) has ruled in one such case that a deceased person's Facebook account is part of their estate. The parents of a 15-year-old girl who was run over by a subway train in 2012 want to access their daughter's Facebook messages to determine whether her tragic death was an accident or suicide. The social network has so far refused access, citing data protection regulations. The court ruling could be groundbreaking for how digital legacy is handled in the future. Regardless, people should familiarize themselves with this issue more thoroughly. In the aforementioned survey, only eight percent of respondents stated that they had entrusted login credentials for all their active online accounts to trusted individuals.
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