Digital remains, post-mortem privacy, and the commercial exploitation of a deceased person's likeness

Rapid advancements in generative AI enable the precise recreation of deceased individuals' digital identities, raising critical concerns about post-mortem privacy and commercial exploitation. While technology now generates hyper-realistic avatars and voice clones, Indian jurisprudence remains constrained by the “actio personalis moritur cum persona” maxim, which extinguishes privacy and personality rights upon death. Consequently, domestic laws such as the Digital Personal Data Protection Act of 2023 fail to address the weaponisation of digital remains or to provide remedies against unauthorised AI replicas. Through a comparative analysis of US and EU frameworks, this paper examines India’s regulatory void and the resulting vulnerability of deceased personas to corporate exploitation. To resolve this, the study proposes the Unified Digital Afterlife Framework: a sui generis model that formally recognizes transmissible post-mortem personality rights, mandates strict AI developer consent obligations, and establishes a centralized licensing registry. Ultimately, protecting post-mortem digital identity is a necessary legal evolution to preserve human dignity and autonomy in an increasingly synthetic media landscape.