With 535 million WhatsApp, 515 million Instagram, 500 million YouTube, 405 million Facebook, 250 million Snapchat, 120 million LinkedIn and 30 million X users, social media and digital footprints, are now an integral part of life.

What happens to these digital identities, however, when the user dies? Most people in India do not have end-of-life-care plans, but even if they do have formal plans in place, there is generally no thought given to the management of digital assets, including not just social media profiles, but also email accounts, cloud photographs, messaging histories, cryptocurrency wallets, monetised channels, online subscriptions, and gaming identities. With 9.75 million deaths occurring every year in India alone, we are talking of immense continuing storage of information, perhaps perpetually.

Changing face of death

Death used to be a biological event, a social ritual and a legal transition. Today, it is also a digital event. The digital data generated during a person’s life does not disappear when the heart stops. It remains locked, scattered and unmanaged. A digital legacy is more than passwords: it is a record of a life lived in networked form. It includes photographs, voice notes, correspondence, creative work uploaded over years, financial assets and much more that may continue to speak after the person is gone. Our digital identities today form a major component of who we are. We are remembered through our posts, recordings, online interactions and messages.

To continue to manage that presence well after death is to respect the individual who persists in memory after biological life ends. The biggest barrier to achieving this is not technology. It is silence. Families are reluctant to discuss death, let alone passwords and digital memories. A family coping with loss may struggle to recover photographs, letters or documents stored online. Automated reminders, birthday notifications, and algorithmic resurfacing of old posts may make grief more difficult to handle.

For bereaved families, the digital presence of a loved one may help with coping with grief. A cloud folder may contain the last family holiday photographs. A WhatsApp chat may preserve a father’s words in his own voice. A social media profile may become an unintended shrine. These traces can comfort the bereaved, but can also be insensitive, cruel and wounding if automated reminders continue to be received and if there is no way to access digital identities in order to manage them.

Privacy rights after death

The Gujarat High Court recently ruledthat digital data stored in an iCloud account can form part of the deceased’s estate and that privacy rights do not survive death. Section 14 of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 allows a data principal to nominate another person who may exercise data rights in the event of one’s death or incapacity. The nominated person can request access, correction or erasure of personal data after death.

Internationally, platforms offer partial afterlife tools, for instance, Apple’s legacy contact, Google’s inactive account manager and Meta’s memorialization or deletion options. ‘Digital Afterlife’ frameworks let users decide in advance whether their data should be deleted, transferred, or preserved, while giving executors or nominated persons defined authority, to act after their death.

Digital inheritance represents a nascent frontier in global jurisprudence. India is on its way to the establishment of early-stage regulatory frameworks. At present, our country does not explicitly define, recognise or provide mechanisms for the posthumous transfer of digital estates, cloud storage, e-books or social media profiles. Even the Information Technology Act, 2000,does not have a comprehensive mechanism for digital succession.

This legal vacuum has profound implications. Without clear statutory guidance, digital assets frequently die with the user, becoming permanently inaccessible or conversely, remaining perpetually active online, rendering the deceased’s identity vulnerable to malicious exploitation, copyright violations, and unauthorised data harvesting.

The role of professionals and users

While in cases of sudden death planning for the management of digital assets may not be possible, it can be part of end-of-life care processes that are now gaining ground in the country.

India is governed primarily by the National Programme for Palliative Care (NPPC) when it comes to patients with terminal illnesses. The Indian Association of Palliative Care (IAPC) even has clinical guidelines explicitly urging palliative care professionals to advocate for, and guide patients toward creating their digital legacy. However, there is a knowledge deficit among stakeholders in the palliative healthcare system insofar as digital assets are concerned. A study of 260 medical officers in four districts in West Bengal revealed a 99% unfamiliarity with core concepts of the digital afterlife.

For healthcare professionals to guide communities through insightful planning for intertwined ‘physical death’ and ‘digital death’, they too need to be educated on the requisite frameworks. Digital assets should be treated like any other end-of-life responsibility to reduce suffering, prevent conflict and honour autonomy. When life ends, digital information does not decay on its own, so care must extend to the digital self that outlives biology.

End of Life (EoL) patients should decide whether digital traces are deleted, preserved, memorialized or transferred. This is not asset management; it is an extension of informed choice and dignity to preserve or delete sentimental material.

Today, an EoL patient can nominate a trusted contact who gains access after a pre-defined period of account inactivity. Patients must configure this setting prior to death. Otherwise, data defaults to automatic deletion or indefinite locking management of cloud-based digital assets.

Breaking barriers

A major issue in India is that discussing death, dying, and end-of-life planning remains highly stigmatised and culturally taboo in many communities. To systematise this process and avoid ad-hoc guidance, clinical settings must adopt standardised tools, such as a ‘digital will’ or a ‘digital legacy checklist’, adapted from robust frameworks like those developed by the U.K.’s Digital Legacy Association (DLA).

Individuals today cultivate expansive digital identities that exist in parallel to their physical realities. Implementing digital legacy planning is therefore an urgent clinical imperative for holistic end-of-life care. This is essential to ensure the continuity of identity and dignity in the digital age.

(Dr. K. Ganapathy is past president of the Neurological Society of India and the Telemedicine Society of India. A former distinguished visiting professor at IIT, Kanpur he is currently a honorary distinguished professor at IIM, Jammu. drkganapathy@gmail.com)

Published - July 21, 2026 03:06 pm IST