The estate¶

Research brief, The Morporkian Civil Liberties Union (MCLU). Open file.

Somebody dies. The phone is in a drawer. The account is still paid up. The photographs, the messages, the years of journeys and the conversations with an assistant that answered at three in the morning are all still there.

The family want it opened. They have reasons, and some of the reasons are good: a will nobody can find, a debt nobody can explain, a grandchild who will want to know what their grandmother sounded like.

The provider says privacy. The family says inheritance. And a third person, who corresponded with the deceased for eleven years about matters they told nobody else, would rather the family did not read any of it.

Everything in that account was built on the assumption that the subject is alive and can be asked.

• Who decides what happens to an account when the person it belonged to cannot be consulted?

• The living people inside a dead person’s data still have rights. Against whom do they exercise them?

Whether the dead have privacy¶

• Whether GDPR applies after death at all, and what member states have done with the discretion in Recital 27. The variation between them is the point.

• The German federal court ruling on inheritance of a social media account, and what exactly it held about the correspondents.

• The legacy-contact and inactive-account arrangements the major providers actually offer, and what they let an heir see.

• Probate practice on digital assets in England and Wales, and whether an executor has any usable power.

• Anything at all on the correspondent’s position, which we expect to be the thinnest part of the file.

Last updated: 17 September 2026