Social Media Accounts After Death: Rules by Country

Most comparison pages list platform policies and stop there, which produces the impression that Facebook behaves one way in Berlin and another in Boston because the company chose to. It did not. The variation tracks local law, and understanding which legal family a country belongs to tells you what to ask for before you contact anyone. If the account is yours and still live, the practical counterpart to this page is the article on digital assets in your will.

Conclusion: four legal families explain almost every difference

Sort countries by what their law says about a dead person data and the platform policies start to look predictable. In the first family, statutes give heirs or close relatives rights over the content. In the second, data protection law explicitly excludes the deceased, so platform defaults govern. In the third, legislation has settled the property question but not the access question. In the fourth, there is no statute and the platform is the whole of the law. Nearly every practical answer follows from that placement.

• Family 1 - statutory rights over content — Germany and China. The estate or the close relatives can obtain the data itself, not only a memorial state
• Family 2 - privacy law excludes the dead — France and the EU generally, where GDPR Recital 27 removes the deceased from scope and France alone legislated a specific post-mortem directive regime
• Family 3 - property settled, access not — The United Kingdom, where the 2025 property statute confirms digital assets can be owned but leaves account access to platforms
• Family 4 - platform discretion — The United States under a state-by-state framework, plus Japan and Brazil, where no dedicated statute governs and terms of service decide

Germany: the account itself passes to the heirs

Conclusion: Germany is the clearest example of a country where asking for access is the wrong request, because what passes is the contract. In 2018 the Federal Court of Justice ruled on the account of a deceased teenager and held that the social media contract was not so personal that it ended at death. The heirs therefore entered into the contract and could claim the same position the account holder had held, including the messages contained in it. That distinction matters when making a request: an heir in Germany is not asking for a favour, and the request should cite the succession position rather than the memorial process.

China: close relatives can read, copy and delete

Conclusion: China gives relatives a statutory right over the deceased personal information, but only for their own lawful and legitimate interests. Article 49 of the Personal Information Protection Law allows close relatives to access, copy, correct and delete a deceased person personal information, unless the deceased arranged otherwise while alive. Two practical consequences follow. A written statement of the deceased wishes is the most powerful document a family can hold, because it overrides the default. And the right is limited to relatives, so a friend or an executor who is not a close relative falls outside it.

France and the EU: GDPR deliberately stops at death

Conclusion: inside most of the EU there is no inherited right of access at all, and that is a legislative choice rather than an oversight. Recital 27 of GDPR states that the regulation does not apply to the personal data of deceased persons and leaves member states to provide rules. France went further than most: its digital republic statute created post-mortem directives that a person can register to define what happens to their data, and instructed the data protection authority to issue guidance on how platforms process requests from heirs. Everywhere else in the EU, the practical answer is the platform default. The wider legal map is in digital inheritance law by country.

United Kingdom: property rights without an access route

Conclusion: the UK has answered the ownership question and left the access question open. The Property (Digital Assets etc.) Act 2025 removed the argument that something cannot be personal property merely because it is neither a thing possessed nor a thing in action. That helps an estate list and value holdings, and it lets a will make a specific gift. It does not create a right to log into someone account, and the data protection statute separately exempts the deceased, so a British family still depends on what the platform will do. That gap is set out in more detail in the UK digital assets act explainer.

United States, Japan and Brazil: the platform is the rulebook

Conclusion: in these three jurisdictions the terms of service decide, and the terms mostly point to memorialisation. The United States has a widely adopted state-level framework that establishes a priority order, but it governs what a fiduciary may request rather than compelling the platform to hand over content, and state variations decide the details. Japan has no dedicated statute, so providers set the practice, and the same is true in Brazil, where the civil code and data protection law do not address post-mortem account access directly. Families in these countries should treat platform tools as the only reliable route and set them up in advance. The comparison of individual platforms is in social platform memorialisation compared.

What to check before you send a request

• The registered country, not the current one — Find the account creation confirmation email if it still exists. The country at sign-up usually determines the contract, and a family that moved abroad may be dealing with a jurisdiction they no longer live in
• Whether a contact tool is enabled — This is the only route that works regardless of legal family. Check in advance rather than after a death, because none of these tools can be activated by someone else afterwards
• Whether content has value outside the platform — Photos, correspondence and creative work should be exported while the account holder is alive. Post-mortem export is rare, and memorialisation typically freezes content rather than releasing it
• Whether a written wish exists — In the statutory models it changes the default, and in the discretionary models it supports a manual review that would otherwise be refused

Disclaimer

This article describes legal frameworks and platform policies as of October 2026 and is not legal advice. Statutes, court interpretations and platform terms change without notice; confirm the current position with the platform help pages and with a qualified lawyer in the relevant jurisdiction before acting. Nothing here guarantees that a platform will release an account or its contents.