Authors: Amy, Bhuvi, ⁠⁠Madhusmita, ⁠⁠Nitish Kumar.P, ⁠⁠Vailbhavi

ABSTRACT

Every death today leaves behind an estate of pixels as well as property. Photographs, correspondence, cryptocurrency wallets, social media profiles and, increasingly, synthetic recreations of a person’s voice now survive the individual who created them. Indian law has responded only in fragments. Section 14 of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 permits a data principal to nominate a representative to exercise data rights after death, but stops short of treating digital data as inheritable property. The Indian Succession Act, 1925, the Hindu Succession Act, 1956, and Muslim personal law were drafted for tangible and straightforwardly intangible property and struggle to accommodate assets that are simultaneously personal data, contractual licences and economic wealth. Constitutional jurisprudence recognises that dignity survives death while remaining ambivalent about privacy, and the nascent doctrine on posthumous personality rights is internally inconsistent. This paper synthesises Indian statutory, constitutional and judicial material with comparative learning from the United States and the European Union to argue that India requires a unified statutory hierarchy–modelled loosely on the American Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act–reconciling nominee authority, heir entitlement and platform discretion, while separately addressing the unregulated commercial and synthetic exploitation of the dead.

Keywords: Digital remains; post-mortem privacy; Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023; digital inheritance; personality rights; succession law; comparative data protection; artificial intelligence and deepfakes

I. INTRODUCTION

Death no longer erases a person from the digital world; it merely changes their status within it. [1] A lifetime of browsing, messaging, storing and posting now survives as an estate of data–cloud archives, social media profiles, cryptocurrency wallets, subscription libraries and, increasingly, artificial-intelligence models trained on a person’s voice and mannerisms. The transition from a living Data Principal to a deceased person whose data continues to exist and evolve is memorialised in features as mundane as memorial pages and as unsettling as AI-generated avatars of the dead. 

Indian law has begun to notice this transition without reckoning with it. The Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 (“DPDP Act”) is the first Indian statute expressly acknowledging that a Data Principal’s digital identity does not vanish on death or incapacity, [2] yet its intervention–a limited right to nominate a representative–sits awkwardly beside a succession regime designed for land, jewellery and bank accounts, and beside a constitutional privacy jurisprudence that has extended dignity beyond death while remaining silent on informational privacy. This paper asks how Indian law should classify, protect and transmit digital remains, and situates that inquiry against a May 2026 ruling of the Gandhinagar court in Sadhna Shaishav Shah v. Apple Distribution International Ltd., which for the first time in India treated cloud-stored data as inheritable movable property. [3] It argues that India’s regulatory response is fragmented across at least four bodies of law–data protection, succession, information technology and constitutional privacy–none designed with the others in view, and that this fragmentation will only be magnified by the commercial and synthetic exploitation of the dead through artificial intelligence.

II. RESEARCH PROBLEM, QUESTIONS AND OBJECTIVES

The research problem is that Indian law offers no coherent framework for the post-mortem treatment of digital assets and digital identity. Existing statutes address adjacent but distinct concerns–data protection, unauthorised computer access, testamentary succession–without establishing any hierarchy among a deceased person’s DPDP nominee, statutory heirs, and the terms of service platforms unilaterally impose. 

This paper accordingly asks: (i) whether digital assets should be classified as property, contractual licences, or a hybrid category for succession purposes; (ii) whether Section 14 of the DPDP Act confers more than a custodial, privacy-oriented mandate on a nominee; (iii) whether constitutional privacy under Article 21 survives death, and if not, whether that gap is filled by the law of dignity and personality; and (iv) what comparative lessons India may draw from the United States’ fiduciary-access and publicity-rights doctrines and the European Union’s more developed post-mortem data protection regimes. 

The objectives that follow are to map the applicable Indian statutory and constitutional framework; to critically analyse the Sadhna Shaishav Shah ruling and the inconsistent Indian case law on posthumous personality rights; to draw structured comparisons with the United States and the European Union; and to recommend a reform pathway capable of reconciling privacy, property and personality in a single statutory instrument.

III. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

This study adopts a doctrinal and comparative legal method. [4] The doctrinal component involves a systematic analysis of Indian statutes–the DPDP Act, 2023, the Information Technology Act, 2000, the Indian Succession Act, 1925, the Hindu Succession Act, 1956, the Muslim Personal Law (Shariat) Application Act, 1937, and the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023–together with constitutional case law on privacy and dignity, most significantly Justice K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India. [5] No empirical method has been employed; the findings rest entirely on secondary legal material, including peer-reviewed commentary, law-reform reports, and platform policy documents. [6]

The comparative component draws on two jurisdictions selected for contrasting reasons. The European Union is examined because Recital 27 of the General Data Protection Regulation (“GDPR”) excludes the deceased from its protection while permitting member states to legislate independently, producing a natural experiment in which France and Germany built proactive regimes while the United Kingdom and Sweden did not. [7] The United States is examined for its parallel contribution: a mature, if contested, doctrine of descendible publicity rights, together with the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act (“RUFADAA”), adopted by most American states to govern fiduciary access to a decedent’s digital accounts. [8]

The research is limited by the infancy of Indian judicial engagement with digital remains–only a handful of decisions exist–and by the pace of technological change, particularly generative artificial intelligence, which may outstrip any framework proposed here. Ethically, the study is guided by respect for the autonomy and dignity of the deceased, balanced against the legitimate interests of grieving families and the public interest in technological innovation.

IV. LITERATURE REVIEW

A. Conceptualising Digital Death

Early anthropological and psychological literature frames the “digital afterlife” as a sociocultural phenomenon rather than a purely legal one. E. Lapper’s ethnographic study of bereavement on platforms such as Facebook and Instagram argues for a “shared anthropology” of digital mourning, emphasising the ethical responsibilities the living owe to the online traces of the dead. [9] Complementary psychological scholarship on post-mortem legacy suggests that digital traces sustain the bereaved’s continuing bond with the deceased, which helps explain why memorialisation is as legally significant as data-deletion. [10]

Two competing conceptual lenses dominate the legal literature that follows. Private-law scholars increasingly treat digital assets as a “new type of asset,” analysable through property, inheritance and governance concepts, managed or disposed of much like real estate or intellectual property. [11] A rival, dignity-centred literature insists that this property framing understates what is at stake: because social media profiles, correspondence and photographs constitute part of a person’s identity, posthumous privacy deserves protection as an extension of human dignity rather than mere patrimony. [12] This tension recurs throughout the Indian material and is never fully resolved–a point this paper returns to in Part VIII. 

B. The Indian Statutory Debate: Nominee, Owner, or Neither

Indian commentary on Section 14 of the DPDP Act converges on one central proposition: nomination is not inheritance. [13] Commentators observe that Indian law generally treats a nominee as a trustee or custodian rather than a beneficial owner, so that a nominee’s authority to access, correct or erase data does not displace legal heirs’ entitlement under succession law to the same account. [14] This produces the much-discussed “destruction of estate value” concern: a nominee exercising an unqualified right of erasure over a commercially valuable account–a monetised channel, a cryptocurrency wallet, a digital business–could extinguish assets to which heirs are separately entitled, and the Act supplies no mechanism to adjudicate that conflict. [15]

A separate strand of Indian scholarship catalogues the constitutional silence on post-mortem informational privacy. Building on Puttaswamy, commentators note that the Supreme Court articulated informational, bodily and decisional privacy, and dignity, as facets of Article 21, but confined its reasoning to living persons, leaving no definitive pronouncement on survival after death. [16] By contrast, Indian courts have been comparatively assertive in extending dignity itself beyond death–recognising a right to a dignified burial or cremation and to respectful treatment of a corpse in Parmanand Katara v. Union of India, Ashray Adhikar Abhiyan v. Union of India and Common Cause v. Union of India–without ever holding that informational privacy travels the same road. [17] The Madras High Court’s observations in Deepa Jayakumar v. AL Vijay are frequently cited for the narrower proposition that privacy, as opposed to dignity or reputation, does not descend to heirs as an enforceable right. [18] The consequence, as this paper’s data-analysis in Part V.B develops, is a bifurcated constitutional landscape: dignity survives death; privacy, on the weight of current authority, does not. 

C. Classification of Digital Assets and Succession

A further and largely India-specific literature addresses taxonomy: not all digital assets are alike, and their legal treatment on death depends on classification. Scholars distinguish money-like assets, tokenised financial instruments, cryptoassets, functional tokens conferring governance or access rights, and non-fungible tokens, arguing that classification should track economic function and legal character rather than the underlying blockchain technology. [19] The most consequential distinction for succession purposes, however, is simpler: ownership versus licensed access. [20] Cryptocurrency and intellectual property typically represent transferable property capable of passing to the estate; social media accounts, gaming profiles and streaming subscriptions are typically licensed services governed by terms of service that make the account personal, non-transferable and revocable on death. [21] Commentators observe that users routinely misunderstand this distinction, believing they “own” accounts they merely have permission to access–a misunderstanding with significant consequences once a licence terminates on the user’s death. [22]

D. Comparative Scholarship

A distinct body of American scholarship addresses posthumous personality and publicity rights, and illuminates India’s nascent and inconsistent case law discussed in Part VI. Felcher and Rubin’s foundational 1980 article contended that the economic value of a celebrity’s identity survives death as a proprietary, inheritable interest, distinguishing the commercially oriented right of publicity from the dignitary right of privacy. [23] Their property-centred account shaped subsequent state legislation, including California’s statutory recognition of descendible publicity rights, but has been criticised for reducing human identity to a commodifiable asset without adequately answering dignitary concerns. [24]

Jennifer Rothman’s more recent scholarship challenges that property paradigm directly, arguing that publicity rights originated in, and should be reconceived as, rights of personal autonomy and dignity rather than freely transferable intellectual property, and warning that an unconstrained property model licenses excessive commercialisation of identity at the expense of free expression. [25] Victoria Haneman’s work on “digital resurrection” extends this critique into the age of generative artificial intelligence, arguing that existing publicity-rights doctrine–built for commercial endorsement disputes–cannot address the non-commercial but dignity-harming recreation of the dead through AI avatars, deepfakes and synthetic voice models, and proposing a post-mortem right of informational self-determination distinct from ownership or licensing. [26] Read together, this scholarship traces an arc from property to dignity that mirrors, almost precisely, the unresolved tension in Indian constitutional doctrine between property-like succession rights and dignity-based privacy protection. 

European and British scholarship, by contrast, is oriented less around personality rights than around data protection proper, tracing how Recital 27 of the GDPR left member states a shared starting point from which France, Germany, Italy and Spain built proactive statutory or constitutional protections while the United Kingdom and Sweden did not, a divergence examined comparatively in Part VII. [27]

V. THE INDIAN LEGAL FRAMEWORK

A. The DPDP Act, 2023 and the Structural Limits of Consent

The DPDP Act constructs an agency-based regime in which a Data Principal exercises rights–to access, correction, erasure and grievance redressal–grounded in ongoing consent. [28] Section 14 supplies the Act’s only acknowledgment of post-mortem or incapacity-related concerns: it permits a Data Principal to nominate an individual to exercise those same rights upon death or upon incapacity, defined as an inability to exercise rights owing to mental unsoundness or physical infirmity. [29]

This provision is best understood not as an exception to the Act’s consent-based architecture but as a structural consequence of it. Because the DPDP Act presupposes an agent capable of giving and withdrawing consent, a deceased Data Principal–lacking legal capacity by definition–cannot participate in that framework; Section 14 substitutes the nominee’s will for the Data Principal’s, but only within the narrow compass of privacy-related rights, and does not purport to transfer property. The Act nowhere states that Data Principal status devolves to heirs or executors, so no legal fiction preserves that status after death; absent an express nomination, the rights simply terminate. This creates the central doctrinal fault line examined throughout this paper: heirs may inherit a digital asset’s economic value under succession law while possessing no corresponding authority over the privacy interests–often held in the same account–that the DPDP Act reserves for a nominee, if one has been designated at all. [30]

B. Constitutional Privacy and Dignity After Death

The constitutional backdrop to this statutory gap is Justice K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India, in which the Supreme Court recognised privacy as intrinsic to the fundamental right to life and personal liberty under Article 21, encompassing informational, bodily and decisional dimensions bound up with dignity and autonomy. [31] The judgment’s reasoning is addressed to living Data Principals; it neither affirms nor forecloses survival of the right after death, leaving India without any definitive constitutional pronouncement on post-mortem informational privacy. 

Indian courts have, however, been willing to extend a closely related value–dignity–beyond the grave. In Parmanand Katara v. Union of India and its successors, courts have held that the right to a dignified disposal of a corpse and to respectful funerary treatment falls within Article 21 notwithstanding the subject’s death. [32] Yet the Madras High Court’s treatment of Deepa Jayakumar v. AL Vijay is regularly cited for the narrower and, on the current state of authority, more consequential proposition that privacy–as distinct from dignity or reputation–does not pass to heirs as an enforceable constitutional entitlement. [33] The resulting asymmetry is doctrinally significant: dignity survives death and can ground legal claims by descendants; informational privacy, on the better view, does not, leaving heirs unable to invoke Article 21 to control access to a deceased relative’s digital communications even where they can invoke succession law to claim the underlying account as an asset. 

C. The Information Technology Act, 2000

The Information Technology Act, 2000 supplies the criminal and civil-liability backdrop against which posthumous access to digital accounts occurs. Section 43 creates civil liability for unauthorised access to a computer resource; Section 66 criminalises dishonest or fraudulent contraventions of the same kind; and Section 72 imposes an ongoing confidentiality obligation on anyone who has obtained lawful access under the Act. [34] Read together, an heir who accesses an account without lawful authority risks civil or criminal exposure, while an heir with proper authority–through probate, letters of administration, or a court order, as in Sadhna Shaishav Shah–is generally protected but remains bound by Section 72’s confidentiality obligation thereafter. [35] Inheritance of a digital asset does not by itself confer an unrestricted licence to disclose its contents; the Act layers a continuing privacy constraint atop whatever property right succession law recognises. 

D. Succession Law and the Classification Problem

India’s personal-law succession regimes–the Indian Succession Act, 1925 for Christians, Parsis and residuary cases; the Hindu Succession Act, 1956 for Hindus, Buddhists, Jains and Sikhs; and the Muslim Personal Law (Shariat) Application Act, 1937–were not drafted with digital assets in view, and each experiences distinct strain when applied to them. [36] Under the Indian Succession Act, a digital asset with clear economic value–most plausibly cryptocurrency, classifiable as movable property under the General Clauses Act, 1897–can in principle devolve to legal heirs, but the Act supplies no mechanism for the practical problem of access where recovery depends on private cryptographic keys rather than physical possession, and Indian probate practice still expects a physical will, leaving electronic testamentary instruments in a legal grey zone. [37]

Under the Hindu Succession Act, the Mitakshara concept of coparcenary property, acquired by birth, requires a separate inquiry into control, contribution and acquisition before a digital asset can be characterised as coparcenary rather than separate property; family-shared cloud storage resembles a joint licensing arrangement more than coparcenary property, though jointly funded cryptocurrency held through a multi-signature wallet may support a joint beneficial interest. [38] Muslim personal law’s heir-centric, fractional scheme of intestate succession can accommodate digital assets of measurable economic value, but platform accounts and cloud logins sit uneasily within a framework built around property in the classical sense, and the prohibition on riba is relevant only where a digital financial instrument is structured to generate interest. [39]

Across all three regimes, the recurring difficulty is the same: a digital asset is rarely a single legal thing. A user may own a cryptocurrency holding while merely licensing the platform account through which it is accessed; an email archive is not a chattel but a record set entangled with the privacy interests of the deceased and third-party correspondents; and even a valid will cannot compel a platform to transfer an account whose terms prohibit assignment. [40]

E. Platform Policies as De Facto Regulation

In the absence of comprehensive legislation, the largest technology platforms have become the primary regulators of digital remains. Google’s Inactive Account Manager allows a user to designate recipients, specify which data each may receive, and set an inactivity threshold; Meta’s memorialisation process converts a deceased user’s profile into a page managed by a Legacy Contact whose powers are deliberately narrow–excluding access to private messages or full account control; and Instagram follows a similar model without transferring ownership to anyone. [41] Indian commentary is unanimous that these tools operate contractually between user and platform and cannot substitute for a determination, under Indian law, of title, ownership or access; a considered estate plan must align platform settings with a valid will, since platform policy and succession law answer different questions and neither can override the other. [42]

VI. JUDICIAL INTERPRETATION AND RECENT DEVELOPMENTS

A. Sadhna Shaishav Shah v. Apple Distribution International Ltd.

The Gandhinagar court’s May 2026 decision in Sadhna Shaishav Shah v. Apple Distribution International Ltd. is the clearest judicial recognition to date that digital data constitutes inheritable property under Indian law. [43] The petitioners–the widow and daughter of a man who died intestate, holding Class-I heir status–sought access to his iPhone and associated Apple ID and iCloud account. Apple’s position was that access required a court order appointing a legal representative; the petitioners accordingly published notice under Section 283 of the Indian Succession Act and, receiving no objections, sought Letters of Administration. [44]

The court granted Letters of Administration to the daughter, directed Apple to assist in recovering the data insofar as technically possible, and required an estate inventory consistent with Section 317 of the Indian Succession Act. [45] To reach this conclusion, the court adopted an expansive reading of “movable property,” drawing on the General Clauses Act, 1897, the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, and the Income Tax Act, 1961, and held that the right to privacy is inherently personal and terminates on death–invoking the maxim actio personalis moritur cum persona to conclude that privacy could not bar the heirs’ access to the digital estate. [46]

The ruling’s significance lies in converting cloud-stored data from a “transient corporate asset,” in the platforms’ own self-conception, into a legally recognised intangible estate subject to the ordinary machinery of probate. [47] It also illustrates the doctrinal cost identified in Part V.B: by resolving the case on the premise that privacy dies with the person, the court sidestepped rather than answered how a DPDP nominee’s residual data rights–had one been appointed–would interact with the heirs’ now-recognised property interest in the same account. The decision advances the property side of the ledger considerably further than the privacy side, without the unified framework the underlying conflict actually requires. 

B. The Fractured Doctrine of Posthumous Personality Rights

If Sadhna Shaishav Shah supplies a relatively coherent, if incomplete, answer for digital property, Indian case law on posthumous personality and publicity rights supplies almost no coherent answer at all. In the Sushant Singh Rajput litigation, the Delhi High Court declined to enjoin a film based on the deceased actor’s life, reasoning that personality rights derive from privacy, that privacy ends at death, and that biographical facts about a deceased public figure remain in the public domain–an explicit rejection of inheritable posthumous personality rights. [48]

Two years later, the same court reached what is difficult to characterise as anything other than the opposite conclusion in proceedings arising from the unauthorised commercial use of Ratan Tata’s name, image and persona, granting interim protection on the footing that publicity rights function as property–economically valuable, transferable to heirs, capable of sustaining an inheritable goodwill claim against unauthorised exploitation. [49] Other High Courts add further inconsistency: the Gujarat High Court’s Jalaram Bapa decision sided with heirs restraining misuse of a revered figure’s image, while a subsequent Madhya Pradesh High Court decision declined to restrain a biographical film against heirs’ objections. [50] Whether a likeness is inheritable, on this body of law, depends less on settled principle than on which court hears the claim and in which year. 

C. The Regulatory Silence on AI and Digital Resurrection

None of this case law–nor any Indian statute–addresses the non-commercial but dignity-implicating recreation of the dead through artificial intelligence: cloned voices, deepfaked faces, and chatbots trained on a deceased person’s messages. [51] The Copyright Act withholds protection from a person’s name, voice, face and personality as such, and the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita’s provision on defamation of the dead applies only where a false statement causes emotional harm to relatives, leaving purely synthetic, non-defamatory recreations unregulated. [52] An AI company could, on the current state of Indian law, lawfully synthesise a deceased public figure’s voice and license it to advertisers without infringing copyright, trademark, or the inconsistent personality-rights doctrine surveyed above–the most urgent gap identified in the literature reviewed in Part IV.D, and one on which Indian law currently offers no answer.

VII. COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS

A. The United States: Fiduciary Access and the Property-Dignity Debate

The American experience offers India two complementary lessons. The first concerns practical fiduciary access rather than substantive rights: RUFADAA, adopted in some form by most American states, establishes a clear hierarchy privileging, first, the user’s own written instructions in a will or online tool; second, platform-provided legacy tools; and third, default fiduciary access by a court-appointed executor where neither exists. [53] This ordered priority is precisely what Indian law lacks: nothing in the DPDP Act, the IT Act, or the succession statutes tells a platform, a nominee, or a court which instruction should prevail when a Data Principal’s directive, a platform’s legacy setting, and an heir’s probate claim point in different directions. 

The second lesson concerns substantive personality rights, and is more contested. California’s statutory recognition of descendible publicity rights operationalises the property-centred account associated with Felcher and Rubin, treating a deceased celebrity’s name, voice and likeness as a transmissible economic asset. [54] Rothman’s critique–that this property paradigm has metastasised beyond protecting legitimate economic interests and now licenses excessive commercialisation of identity at the expense of dignity and free expression–has fed directly into the pending federal NO FAKES Act. [55] Haneman’s argument that digital resurrection requires a distinct post-mortem right of informational self-determination, separate from both publicity and privacy, represents the furthest development of this debate and speaks directly to the gap identified in Part VI.C. [56] India’s own case law–oscillating between Sushant Singh Rajput and Ratan Tata–replicates this unresolved American debate without engaging it explicitly. 

B. The European Union and the United Kingdom: A Shared Starting Point, Divergent Outcomes

Recital 27 of the GDPR excludes deceased persons from the Regulation’s protection while permitting member states to legislate independently–a natural experiment in comparative law. [57] The United Kingdom did not use this latitude: British law provides no dedicated post-mortem data protection regime, relying on the narrow common-law action for breach of confidence, illustrated by a 2007 decision upholding a hospital’s right to withhold a deceased patient’s medical records–a protection that shields the record-holder rather than conferring any active right on the family. [58] The UK is similarly hands-off on personality rights: a deceased person’s image may generally be used commercially without family consent absent an independent copyright or trademark claim, and there is no standalone post-mortem image right. [59]

France and Germany used the same latitude to build materially more protective regimes. Since 2016, French law has permitted individuals to leave binding instructions governing their digital data after death, while Germany protects a deceased person’s dignity through constitutional doctrine family members may enforce, and both generally require consent before a deceased person’s likeness is used commercially. [60] The comparison shows the oft-cited “EU advantage” is not a feature of EU law at all, but of specific national statutes; Sweden followed the UK’s minimalist approach despite equal access to the same latitude, confirming that outcome depended on national legislative choice rather than any Brussels-level mandate. [61]

C. Artificial Intelligence: A Shared Global Gap

The EU’s Artificial Intelligence Act requires that AI-generated content, including deepfakes, be labelled as such regardless of whether the person depicted is living or dead–the most advanced statutory response among the jurisdictions surveyed here. [62] Yet the obligation is one of transparency only: it requires disclosure that content is synthetic, not consent from the deceased person’s family before the content is created at all. [63] Neither the EU, the UK, nor the United States–where the NO FAKES Act remains pending rather than enacted–currently gives a decedent’s family an enforceable right to prevent an AI recreation of their relative from being made in the first place. [64] This is, on the comparative evidence assembled here, a genuinely global regulatory vacuum, and one that India, still legislating for a pre-AI conception of digital remains, is presently even further from closing than its more developed comparators.

VIII. CRITICAL ANALYSIS AND CHALLENGES

Drawing the preceding parts together, Indian law’s treatment of digital remains suffers from five interlocking deficiencies. First, a regulatory vacuum: the Data Protection Board of India has no jurisdiction over deceased persons’ data, so disputes are resolved through an ad hoc combination of succession law, platform terms, and improvised judicial reasoning of the kind seen in Sadhna Shaishav Shah, producing inconsistent outcomes. [65]

Second, an unresolved conflict between succession law and data protection law: the Indian Succession Act requires orderly transfer of a deceased person’s estate to legal heirs, while the DPDP Act privileges a nominee’s privacy-oriented mandate, and neither statute resolves a case where erasure would extinguish an asset the heirs are separately entitled to inherit. [66] Third, an asymmetrical constitutional inheritance: dignity survives death and can found a legal claim, while informational privacy, on the better view, does not–leaving Indian privacy law more protective of a corpse’s physical treatment than of a decedent’s digital correspondence. [67]

Fourth, unchecked platform discretion: Google, Meta and comparable providers function as self-regulating authorities whose contractual policies cannot substitute for statutory determination of title and access, and may prioritise convenience over the deceased’s privacy or the heirs’ interest. [68] This is compounded by digital obsolescence, where accounts become permanently inaccessible through corporate failure, and by misuse risk, where the absence of verification protocols leaves platforms unable to authenticate a claimed nominee or heir. [69] Sectoral friction adds further strain: banking privacy rules can delay executors’ access, healthcare confidentiality can withhold relevant family history, and platforms oscillate unpredictably between privacy-protective and memorialisation-friendly postures. [70]

Fifth, and most urgently prospective, is the absence of any framework governing AI-driven exploitation of the dead. This is not a distinctly Indian failure–no jurisdiction surveyed here currently gives families an enforceable right to prevent an unwanted AI recreation of a relative–but India’s position is more precarious, since it has not even settled whether ordinary personality rights survive death, as the contradictory Sushant Singh Rajput and Ratan Tata rulings illustrate. [71]

IX. RECOMMENDATIONS

First, India should enact a dedicated statute–rather than piecemeal amendments to the DPDP Act, the IT Act, or the succession statutes–defining “digital assets” comprehensively, distinguishing owned property from licensed access and personal data from economically valuable holdings, along lines urged in the classification literature discussed in Part IV.C. [72] A standalone instrument avoids the fragmentation risked by amending several statutes independently. 

Second, that statute should adopt an ordered hierarchy modelled on RUFADAA: first, the deceased’s own written instructions, in a will or digital directive; second, platform-provided legacy tools; and third, default fiduciary access for executors or heirs within a defined period. [73] Such a hierarchy would resolve the nominee-versus-heir conflict identified in Part V.A by making priority explicit rather than leaving it to platform discretion or litigation. 

Third, the proposed Digital India Act, intended to succeed the Information Technology Act, 2000, presents a ready vehicle for harmonising privacy, cyber, and estate law, provided its drafters treat post-mortem data governance as a distinct chapter rather than an afterthought. [74] Fourth, India should follow the French and German examples in permitting binding digital directives registered independently of a will, avoiding the confidentiality problems of embedding passwords in a probate-public document, and encourage the estate-planning practices already recommended in the literature–digital inventories, password managers with emergency access, and a clear allocation between assets to be kept, transferred, or deleted. [75]

Fifth, and separately from digital-asset succession, India requires legislation on posthumous personality rights specifying what counts as a protectable interest, how long protection lasts, who may enforce it, and what remedies exist against unauthorised AI-generated recreations–closing the gap left by the Sushant Singh Rajput and Ratan Tata inconsistency and the transparency-only model of the EU AI Act. [76] Finally, platforms operating in India should be required to align memorialisation and legacy tools with the statutory hierarchy above, rather than allowing private terms of service to operate as a parallel, inconsistent system of succession.

X. CONCLUSION

India’s law of digital remains has advanced furthest where courts have treated cloud-stored data as ordinary movable property, as the Gandhinagar court did in Sadhna Shaishav Shah, and has advanced least where the underlying interest is privacy or personality rather than property. The DPDP Act’s Section 14 nominee mechanism, the constitutional asymmetry between surviving dignity and terminated privacy, and the contradictory personality-rights case law surveyed in Part VI together demonstrate that Indian law answers “can digital data be inherited?” more confidently than “who controls a dead person’s digital identity, and on what terms?” 

Comparative experience in the United States and the European Union confirms that no jurisdiction has fully answered the second question, but shows that a clear statutory hierarchy–of the kind RUFADAA supplies for fiduciary access, and French and German law supply for post-mortem dignity–can make the first question tractable. India should adopt such a hierarchy, embed it in a dedicated statute rather than scattered amendments, and use the same legislative moment to confront the harder question of what protection the law should extend against the AI-driven recreation of the dead.

[1]E. Lapper, Digital Death: Methods and Collaboration Towards a Shared Anthropology, 48 J.fi 1 (2024).

[2]Digital Personal Data Protection Act, No. 22 of 2023, § 14, Acts of Parliament, 2023 (India).

[3]Sadhna Shaishav Shah v. Apple Distrib. Int’l Ltd., 2026 S.C.C. OnLine Dist. Ct. (Guj.) 1 (India).

[4]See Research Methodology (India-focused), on file with author (doctrinal and comparative legal method).

[5]Justice K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India, (2017) 10 S.C.C. 1 (India).

[6]See Research Methodology (U.S.-focused), on file with author (doctrinal analysis of secondary legal sources).

[7]Council Regulation 2016/679, recital 27, 2016 O.J. (L 119) (EU) (General Data Protection Regulation).

[8]Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act (2015), Unif. L. Comm’n.

[9]E. Lapper, supra note 1.

[10]Hui Fa, The Psychology of Post-Mortem Legacy: Conceptual Transformation, Mechanisms and Implications for Wellbeing, 2 (2026).

[11]Argyro Juhász, Digital Assets and Their Assessment in Private Law with Special Regard on Inheritance Law Provisions, ResearchGate (June 2025); see also UNIDROIT, Principles on Digital Assets and Private Law (2023).

[12]Anita L. Allen & Jennifer E. Rothman, Postmortem Privacy, Mich. L. Rev. (Nov. 2024); see also Dr. Patrick A. Strokes, Digital Remains: Ethical Preservation, Disposal and Reuse of Online Artefacts of the Dead, NSW L. Reform Comm’n (last visited July 3, 2026).

[13]Abhishek Yadav, Digital Nominee v. Legal Heirs: Who Owns Your Data After Death?, LiveLaw (Feb. 5, 2026); Shruti Mehta, Digital Succession in the Modern Age, Solomon & Co. (on file with author).

[14]King Stubb & Kasiva, Balancing Privacy and Property (updated Apr. 2, 2026); Jidesh Kumar, Data Principal’s Right to Nominate Under the DPDP Act, 2023, King Stubb & Kasiva (updated Oct. 13, 2025); see also Aniket Ghosh, Digital Succession in India, NASSCOM Community (last visited July 3, 2026).

[15]Id.

[16]Puttaswamy, supra note 5.

[17]Parmanand Katara v. Union of India, (1989) 4 S.C.C. 286 (India); Ashray Adhikar Abhiyan v. Union of India, W.P.(C) No. 6620/2001 (Del. H.C.) (India); Common Cause v. Union of India, (2018) 5 S.C.C. 1 (India).

[18]Deepa Jayakumar v. A.L. Vijay, 2021 S.C.C. OnLine Mad. 2318 (India).

[19]See Digital Inheritance and Succession: A Literature Review § 3 (compiled June 2026) (taxonomy of digital assets by economic function and legal character).

[20]Digital Inheritance and Succession: A Literature Review § 4 (compiled June 2026) (ownership versus licensed access).

[21]Id.

[22]Id.

[23]Peter L. Felcher & Edward L. Rubin, The Descendibility of the Right of Publicity: Is There Commercial Life After Death?, 89 Yale L.J. 1125 (1980); Cal. Civ. Code § 3344.1 (California Celebrities Rights Act).

[24]Id.

[25]Jennifer E. Rothman, The Right of Publicity: Privacy Reimagined for a Public World (2018); NO FAKES Act, S. 1367, 118th Cong. (2023) (as reintroduced).

[26]Victoria J. Haneman, The Law of Digital Resurrection (forthcoming).

[27]GDPR recital 27, supra note 7.

[28]DPDP Act, supra note 2.

[29]Id.

[30]Yadav, supra note 13.

[31]Puttaswamy, supra note 5.

[32]Parmanand Katara, supra note 17.

[33]Deepa Jayakumar, supra note 18.

[34]Information Technology Act, No. 21 of 2000, §§ 43, 66, 72, Acts of Parliament, 2000 (India).

[35]Id.

[36]See Digital Inheritance and Succession: A Literature Review §§ 5.2-5.6 (compiled June 2026); Indian Succession Act, No. 39 of 1925; Hindu Succession Act, No. 30 of 1956; Muslim Personal Law (Shariat) Application Act, No. 26 of 1937; General Clauses Act, No. 10 of 1897, § 3(36) (India).

[37]Id.

[38]Id.

[39]Id.

[40]See Digital Inheritance and Succession: A Literature Review § 5.4 (compiled June 2026).

[41]Google, Inactive Account Manager (platform policy, on file with author); Meta, Memorialization and Legacy Contact Policy (on file with author); Instagram, Memorialization Policy (on file with author).

[42]Id.

[43]Sadhna Shaishav Shah, supra note 3.

[44]Id.

[45]Id.

[46]Id.

[47]Id.

[48]Sushant Singh Rajput personality-rights proceedings (Delhi High Court, 2023) (declining to enjoin biographical film; personality rights held not to survive death).

[49]Ratan Tata posthumous publicity-rights proceedings (Delhi High Court, 2025) (interim protection against unauthorised commercial use of name, image and persona).

[50]Jalaram Bapa case (Gujarat High Court, 2010); Shah Bano biographical-film case (Madhya Pradesh High Court, 2025-26).

[51]The Copyright Act, No. 14 of 1957 (India) (excluding name, voice, face and personality from protection); Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, No. 45 of 2023, (defamation of the deceased) (India).

[52]Id.

[53]RUFADAA, supra note 8.

[54]Felcher & Rubin, supra note 23.

[55]Rothman, supra note 25.

[56]Haneman, supra note 26.

[57]GDPR recital 27, supra note 7.

[58]See breach-of-confidence proceedings upholding hospital’s refusal to disclose a deceased patient’s medical records (2007) (U.K.).

[59]See generally U.K. common law on image and personality rights (absence of standalone post-mortem right).

[60]Loi no. 2016-1321 du 7 octobre 2016 pour une République numérique (Fr.) (post-mortem digital data directives); Grundgesetz [GG] art. 1, 2 (Ger.) (constitutional protection of post-mortem personality and dignity).

[61]GDPR recital 27, supra note 7.

[62]Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 of the European Parliament and of the Council (Artificial Intelligence Act), 2024 O.J. (L 1689) (transparency obligations for AI-generated content, including deepfakes).

[63]Id.

[64]Id.

[65]See Digital Personal Data Protection Act, No. 22 of 2023, (India) (Data Protection Board’s jurisdiction confined to living Data Principals); Mike Bennett & Nicole Bennett, Big Tech Is Becoming the Executor of the Dead, Tech Pol’y Press (May 29, 2026); Chloe Gronow, Families Forced to “Battle” Tech Companies to Access Loved Ones’ Digital Assets, IFA Magazine (May 16, 2026); Hospice UK, What to Do with Digital Accounts When Someone Dies (last visited July 4, 2026).

[66]Yadav, supra note 13.

[67]Parmanand Katara, supra note 17.

[68]Platform policies, supra note 41.

[69]Bennett & Bennett, supra note 65.

[70]Id.

[71]Sushant Singh Rajput proceedings, supra note 48.

[72]See Digital Inheritance and Succession: A Literature Review § 9 (compiled June 2026) (case for a standalone digital-succession statute).

[73]RUFADAA, supra note 8.

[74]Ministry of Electronics & Info. Tech., Proposed Digital India Act (consultation framework) (India).

[75]See Digital Inheritance and Succession: A Literature Review § 8.3 (compiled June 2026) (estate-planning practices for digital assets).

[76]Copyright Act, supra note 51.