Social Media Profiles and Deceased Users: Privacy by Design and the Provision of a Default Rule
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18370983Keywords:
Post mortem protection, Personal data, Personality rights, Social networks, Digital inheritanceAbstract
This article addresses the problem of the death of a user of an autobiographical social network from philosophical, social and legal perspectives. Through a legal-dogmatic and comprehensive-propositive investigation, using a literature review, it seeks to propose a default rule to be adopted to regulate the fate of social media profiles of deceased individuals. In this sense, some issues related to the permanence or deactivation of social network profiles are presented, and then, using the methodology called privacy by design, a possible solution to the problem is constructed. The conclusion is that a default rule based on the deactivation of the profile should be adopted, with temporary storage of the data in files offered by the platforms, taking into account the need to preserve the privacy, identity and image of the deceased, in addition to the protection of their personal data.
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