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Digital Inheritance of Social Media Accounts: Balancing Privacy Rights and Succession under UAE and European Law

Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Background: Social media accounts increasingly combine economic value, personal communications, intellectual property, and data concerning both account holders and third parties. After death, heirs may seek access to administer the estate while platforms invoke privacy, confidentiality, or contractual restrictions. The legal problem is especially difficult because Regulation (EU) 2016/679 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 27 April 2016, known as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), does not itself govern the personal data of deceased persons; European national approaches remain fragmented, and UAE law contains modern succession and data protection rules but no express regime for social media inheritance. This study examines whether, and under what conditions, social media accounts should pass to heirs, and how legal systems can reconcile succession with post-mortem privacy. Method: The article uses doctrinal, analytical, and functional comparative methods. It examines the GDPR, Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, French post-mortem data legislation, German Federal Court of Justice case law on a deceased person’s Facebook account, the UAE Personal Data Protection Law, and the current UAE Personal Status Law. Secondary sources were restricted to scholarship directly addressing digital succession, post-mortem privacy, digital assets, platform contracts, and online-account inheritance. Germany and France serve as contrasting European models, while the UAE offers a case study of legislative silence at the intersection of succession and data protection. Results and Conclusions: The comparison shows that neither automatic inheritance nor absolute privacy provides an adequate solution. The article proposes a functional classification distinguishing personal, commercial, and mixed accounts, together with a structured judicial balancing test. It further identifies six comparative principles: separating account transmissibility from content disclosure; respecting lifetime digital directives; protecting third-party communications; ensuring proportionate judicial access; preventing platform terms from defeating mandatory rights; and addressing cross-border enforceability. These principles are relevant not only to UAE reform but also to European and international legal development. Digital inheritance should therefore be treated as an access-to-justice problem requiring transparent platform procedures, legally supervised remedies, and regulatory coordination across succession, privacy, contract, and data protection law.
DOI: 10.33327/ajee-18-9.4-a0002023
Language: English
Subfield: Law
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $539
OpenAlex ID: W7222148440
FWCI:
Cites: 8
Cited by:
Related to: 10