No Peace After Death? The Impact of AI-Driven Memorial Chatbots on Privacy and Data Protection

Abstract

This paper examines the profitable digital afterlife industry (DAI), whose aim is to monetize the digital remains of departed internet users. Among the different services offered by such an industry, attention is drawn to AI and humanoid robots that create convincing digital surrogates of the deceased. A decade ago, Google patented robots that can be customizable with personality attributes, and later, Microsoft secured a patent for software that could reincarnate people as a chatbot. By focusing on how these technologies actually work, and in particular, on how software systems collect and process the deceased’s data, the intent is to illustrate the normative challenges of the field, namely, the legal puzzles, moral threats, and uncertainties related to privacy and data protection in the after-death governance of cyberspace.