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Outline

Title
Abstract
Background
Research Questions
Aims and Objectives
Theoretical Focus and Limitation
Methodology and Theoretical Framework
What is Personal Data?
Scope of Personal Data Protection Under the GDPR
Posthumous Data Protection in Germany
Posthumous Personal Data Protection in France
Introduction
Conclusion
Chapter 5 Conclusion
References
All Topics
Law
International Law

Death and Personal Data in the Age of Social Media

Profile image of Egoyibo OkoroEgoyibo Okoro

2018, Master's Thesis

Abstract

Privacy should survive death. Privacy should not have to erode at the expiration of human life, especially in an age where digitalisation is part of everyday life. However, personal data protection is usually not accorded to the dead, nor are the dead considered de facto privacy rights bearers. Thus, leaving unprotected the surviving interests of the dead and those of their surviving relatives and/or heirs. The current legal framework of the European Union does not have provisions for a posthumous data protection and/or privacy right – online and/or offline, nor is there a uniform law, globally, regarding the handling of deceased person’s social media contents. What this entails is that personal data of deceased persons are often left to the whims and caprices of Internet Service Providers (hereinafter referred to as ISPs) whom those with vested interests in the privacy and reputation of the deceased must challenge in order to preserve their interests; thereby incurring financial stress, dredging up painful memories and further inflicting emotional distress on the deceased’s loved ones. All unnecessary burdens which can be mitigated or even effaced by the promulgation of posthumous personal data protection of deceased subjects as legal rights of the dead, or through other equally effective protective measures.

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Edina Harbinja

Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal, Vol. 32, No. 1, 2013

Post-mortem privacy is not a recognised term of art or institutional category in general succession law or even privacy literature. It may be termed the right of a person to preserve and control what becomes of his or her reputation, dignity, integrity, secrets or memory after their death. While of established concern in disciplines such as psychology, counselling and anthropology, this notion has till now has received relatively little attention in law, especially common law. We argue that the new circumstances of the digital world, and in particular the emergence of a new and voluminous array of “digital assets” created, hosted and shared on web 2.0 intermediary platforms, and often revealing highly personal or intimate personal data, require a revisiting of this stance. An analysis of comparative common and civilian law institutions, focusing on personality rights, defamation, moral rights and freedom of testation, confirms that there is little support for post-mortem privacy in common law, and while personality rights in general have greater traction in civilian law, including their survival after death, the primary role taken by contract regulation may still mean that users of US-based intermediary platforms, wherever they are based, are deprived of post mortem privacy rights. Having established a crucial gap in online legal privacy protection, we suggest future protection may need to come from legislation, contract or “code” solutions, of which the first emergent into the market is Google Inactive Account Manager.

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Are the dead taking over Facebook? A Big Data approach to the future of death online
Carl Öhman, David Watson

Big Data and Society, 2019

We project the future accumulation of profiles belonging to deceased Facebook users. Our analysis suggests that a minimum of 1.4 billion users will pass away before 2100 if Facebook ceases to attract new users as of 2018. If the network continues expanding at current rates, however, this number will exceed 4.9 billion. In both cases, a majority of the profiles will belong to non-Western users. In discussing our findings, we draw on the emerging scholarship on digital preservation and stress the challenges arising from curating the profiles of the deceased. We argue that an exclusively commercial approach to data preservation poses important ethical and political risks that demand urgent consideration. We call for a scalable, sustainable, and dignified curation model that incorporates the interests of multiple stakeholders.

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Using deceased people’s personal data
Akiko Orita

AI &amp; SOCIETY

It is important to manage individuals’ personal data after their death to maintain their dignity or follow their wishes as much as possible. From this perspective, this report describes the real-world commercialization of immortal digital personalities, which gives eternal life to the deceased in a digital form. We identify the problems with the commercialization of deceased users’ images and personal data, which becomes postmortem entertainment. Considering these problems, we seek out the ideal form of deceased users’ personal data for commercialization. We conduct a social survey to understand how ordinary Japanese people feel about the various types of publicly available services that use personal data after death, such as social network service logs. By analyzing our survey results approximately 20% of respondents would allow the commercial use of their personal data, such as browsing their social network service logs, if they could receive compensation during their lifetime.

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Death and The Persistent Identity: Implications for managing deceased online identities and digital estates
Tracey Ratcliffe

The use of Social Network services has seen a rise in the creation of online digital identities which are capable of persisting, even when the user has passed on. With many people having ‘online lives’, the rituals and practices of grief are now being processed through online mechanisms, such as posts to the deceased SNS profile adding to this persistent identity. This paper discusses social and legal implications that a persistent digital identity could pose after death.

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Death in the era of PerPetual Digital afterlife: Digital assets, Posthumous legacy, ownershiP anD its legal imPlications
Dr. Aswathy P Prakash G, Ph.D, Adv Prashant Mali, Ph.D.

NATIONAL LAW SCHOOL JOURNAL, 2019

Man dies, but his online assets survive and, often, intestate. These digital assets by themselves may not have too much significance, but the data they hold is invaluable to the legal heirs, often mired in secrecy; man lives a secret life, and these online digital assets are privy to the same. The enormous digital assets a user creates during his or her lifetime result in a sizable amount of digital footprint posthumously. The consequence of all these cybernated dossiers is as unpredictable as the death itself, for there's no uniform practice of preservation, removal, and inheritance of these digital assets by the data handlers like social media platforms and other content hosting websites. Adding to this is the lack of proper definition and legal consensus as to what constitutes digital assets and how the deceased user's digital estate should be handled after his/her death. The objectives of this paper are to analyze the impact of death on digital assets and the association between unbequeathed online accounts and issues of identity theft and copyright violations of deceased user's accounts. This paper has adopted a doctrinal research method. The paper also broached the concerns about how these data should be managed in the best interests of legal heirs of the departed. The study shows that there's a lack of awareness among the netizens as to how to plan their digital estate while they are alive, and the personal laws of succession are also not drafted or revised foreseeing this new genre of assets.

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Related topics

  • International Law
  • Privacy and data protection
  • Digital Assets
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