A German court in a significant judgment ruled that the legal heirs will have every right to access a deceased person’s Facebook account. The court pointed out that a social media account can be inherited in the same way as letters. The Federal Court of Justice in Karlsruhe was passing a judgment regarding a mother’s petition on the 15-year-old girl who was hit by a train in Berlin in 2012 could gain access to her daughter’s Facebook account. This account was blocked by Facebook earlier due to privacy reasons.

As per the existing rules and services Facebook had turned the girl’s profile into a ‘memorial’ page, where access to the user data is denied even though the content is still stored on Facebook’s servers. The deceased girl’s parents wanted access to her account to try to find out whether her death had been by suicide or accident. A lower court had ruled in favor of granting the parents full access to their daughter’s account data.

However, the company is not readily accepting the verdict and have appealed against the decision. Facebook, who has around  29 million active users in Germany which is equivalent to more than a third of the population, said that weighing the wishes of relatives against protecting user privacy is one of the toughest decisions the company faces today. The decision comes less than two months after the European Union introduced a new privacy regime, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), to strengthens people’s rights to their data and how companies handle it.

The supporters of Privacy campaigns welcomed the court ruling as a step towards regulating the social networks and digital privacy.

A recent survey by the German information technology association, Bitkom, showed that 49 percent of internet users said they did not care about what happens to their social media profiles after they die.

Ulf Buermeyer, head of the Society for Civil Rights in Berlin, said that the easy access state agencies have to nearly all data on social networks’ servers is a far greater concern than whether relatives can access it.

“While the parents of the deceased had to spend years litigating to read their daughter’s messages, the National Security Agency and the Federal Intelligence Service would only need a few mouse clicks,” Buermeyer said, referring to the U.S. and German intelligence agencies.