Published Paper Details:

The exponential growth in digital technologies has generated a hybrid system that lays the groundwork for complex physical and virtual identities. From the moment of their birth-and increasingly even before-babies start leaving their digital footprints from one processor to another, from one platform to another, and from one service provider to another. Such footprints can be anyone ranging from social media profiles to cloud-based archives, biometric identifiers, geolocation histories, algorithmically generated likenesses, and AI recreations to the human personality: digital self. The death of the physical body is not considered death for the digital self; a digital personality continues to exist in the form of stored data traces, memorialized profiles, communications, data traces, and even synthetic reproductions. This raises many complex legal, ethical, and philosophical questions about the persistence of identity beyond biological death. Who has authority over the digital assets of the deceased? May their image or likeness be commercialized without their consent? Can the "right to be forgotten" transcend the death of the right-holder? And what limits, if any, should be attached to the resurrection of a person's voice, face, or personality through artificial intelligence? Significant development in the recognition of personality rights and data protection regulations has occurred for the postulation of dignity, autonomy, and privacy of the living. The posthumous legal treatment of these rights is much more fragmented, nascent, and, in numerous scenarios, non-existent. Jurisdictions vary widely as regards whether such rights survive death, for how long, and whether they can be enforced by heirs or executors. The lack of an apt wholesome framework leaves those digital legacies vulnerable to misuse, ranging from deepfake porn and identity theft to unauthorized commercialization of the late celebrity's image. This paper presents some of the major conceptual and jurisprudential ideas to recognize and protect posthumous personality rights in the digital domain, ranging from several by-law philosophies, such as the Natural Rights Theory, considering those rights conferred on a human being as correlated with dignity, and therefore, could not die with him or her; Roscoe Pound's Theory of Interests, wherein the law takes into consideration the balance among individual, social, and public interests; and the Theory of Justice of John Rawls, according to which the framework of justice should be generated under conditions that are fair and impartial so as to sustain equality.