Personal Data in Competition, Consumer Protection and Intellectual Property Law by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783662576465
Publisher: Springer Berlin Heidelberg

10.1.3 Conflict with Emerging Objectives of the Data Economy

The interpretation of the German rules on telecommunications secrecy by the KG Berlin is at odds with emerging legal principles and objectives of the data economy. The interpretation would make it impossible for the heirs to delete the data or the accounts of the testator. This would systematically lead to a surge of orphaned social media accounts and of orphaned personal data. The heirs and the next of kin would be prevented from deleting the accounts. The internet companies would have no authority to delete the accounts and also no interest to do so. As a consequence, the number of orphaned data and orphaned accounts would continually grow and they would de facto be attributed to the internet platforms, who could indefinitely exploit these assets.

Several arguments show that the emergence of orphaned personal data which are de facto and permanently attributed to an internet platform should be avoided and, as noted above,97 that the de facto attribution of orphaned data to internet companies would be contrary to the emerging legal policy principles of the data economy. The newly created rules on data portability98 expressly seek to establish a right for users to retrieve their data from the internet platforms. Further, the current discussion about introducing an ownership right in data expressly does not seek to allocate such a right to the platform providers. Rather, it is the role and the autonomy of the data subject that is meant to be enforced. In addition, the postmortal right to personality is administered by the next of kin, who are in many cases identical with the heirs. Therefore, a deletion of the accounts or personal data should—as a default rule—rather be the task of the heirs and not of the internet companies.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.