Question to the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology:

To ask the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, what steps his Department is taking to enable parents the right to access their deceased child’s social media data.

The government is committed to ensuring families feel that the system is on their side when tragedies happen. In these cases, the Online Safety Act provides for Ofcom to require information from services on a child’s online activity at a coroner’s request. To strengthen this, the Data (Use and Access) Bill seeks to establish a data preservation process requiring companies to preserve such relevant information at a coroner’s request.

The Online Safety Act will also require categorised services to be transparent with parents regarding a company’s data disclosure processes, following the death of a child.