Protecting 'Digital Remains' Becomes a Major Issue, Academic Tells IAPP UK
LONDON -- How companies handle people's "digital remains" is one of the most pressing privacy issues of this century, Carl Ohman, Uppsala University (Sweden) political science professor, said Wednesday at the IAPP Data Protection Intensive UK conference.
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Personal data on online platforms is available 24/7, and we're faced with determining what to do with the digital bodies of the dead, Ohman said in a keynote. Questions include how to know where a dead person's data is located, how it can be taken down and who owns it, he said.
In the age of AI, people's digital remains are becoming increasingly active as AI avatars chat with descendants online, Ohman said: This may be what the future of grief looks like.
Big Tech is interested in and is offering afterlife services, Ohman said. In addition, although five years ago it seemed "creepy" to chat with a chatbot, we now do it every day and chatting with the dead will also come to seem normal.
This could be problematic, Ohman added. Apple has an afterlife service that creates someone's digital replica. The replica, however, isn't just a neutral mirror of code arising from the individual's personal data, but rather an interpretation of that data ensuring that the "most profitable memory will always prevail."
But even this isn't the most concerning issue arising from digital death, Ohman noted. Digital data could become the primary source of information left behind for future generations, so there is a question about how it should be managed. This issue has been completely outsourced to digital empires that care only about making money, he added.
By the end of the century, Facebook may account for five billion dead profiles, Ohman said. Managing and storing data is costly, so even if the platform monetizes or deletes profiles, it's unclear who decides which data is worth saving.
Another issue is what happens to dead people's data held by companies that go bankrupt, Ohman said: It would likely be sold to the highest bidder -- and the dead have no data protection rights. The concern is that, in the future, it's possible companies will track people based not on their data but on that of their departed kin, inextricably linking the privacy of the dead to the living.
The geopolitical aspect of this situation is that a handful of tech organizations may eventually own the past, said Ohman.
He recommended that businesses develop a protocol for handling the personal data of departed users and dealing with conflicting claims to that data. In addition, organizations should decide what non-monetary values their data archives hold, and adopt policies around what happens with the personal data of the living and the dead in the case of bankruptcy.