Victoria Haneman is warning us about the afterlife with AI, and we don’t really think about it, but most of us are quietly building a second version of ourselves online. Every message, photo, post, voice note, email — it’s all data. And that data stays behind when we’re gone.
That’s what the law professor at the University of Georgia School of Law, has been thinking about. In a piece called “The Law of Digital Resurrection” in the Boston College Law Review, she makes a simple but powerful argument: the dead should have the right to delete their data.
What happens to our data when we’re gone
With the rise of generative AI, that’s a problem. You’ve got companies like Seance AI, StoryFile, Replika, MindBank Ai, and HereAfter AI taking people’s digital footprints and turning them into… versions of themselves. AI-generated voices. Video avatars. Conversations that feel eerily real.
And sometimes, it happens even if the person or their family doesn’t want it to.
Haneman argues that we need to create a legal boundary, something like a digital version of post-mortem rights, or the right to privacy. She compares it to how we treat someone’s physical remains. Even though a body is no longer legally a person, it’s still protected. It still matters.
So shouldn’t the same go for your emails? Your voice recordings? Your old posts?
It’s not just a U.S. issue. In the European Union, there’s already a stronger culture around privacy and dignity, what they call the right to dignity. Countries like France and Italy allow families to delete or access the data of the deceased. In France, it’s even part of the extended right to be forgotten. In Italy, there’s a right of erasure that lets heirs request deletion of a loved one’s digital presence.
Meanwhile, in the U.S., it’s complicated. There’s the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act (RUFADAA), which gives some legal access to files, but only if someone has a will. And most people don’t. So it falls back to companies like Facebook, who let you request to “memorialize” an account. That keeps it online. Which, to the lawyer, misses the point.
Her concern is the rise of digital resurrection, when artificial intelligence brings someone back without any clear line of consent.
Can you really own a version of yourself
It’s a weird thing to think about. You’re gone, but someone somewhere could use your old messages or videos to make an artificial intelligence that talks like you. Responds like you. Pretends to be you.
You might be okay with that. But what if you’re not?
That’s the gap Haneman is trying to close. Because under U.S. law, even the right to publicity (which protects your name, image, or likeness) only helps in about half the states. And using someone’s data after death? It’s rarely illegal. In fact, it can be protected under the First Amendment, as if creating an artificial intelligence clone of someone counts as “free speech.”
What would be the solution?
The lawyer proposes something simple: give families a window—maybe 12 months—where they can request deletion of the deceased’s personal data. Like a digital version of closing the curtains. It wouldn’t erase public history, but it could stop someone from feeding that data into an AI model.
A law like this would be in line with things like California’s Delete Act, which makes it easier for the living to remove their data from brokers. But even that law, according to the Aspen Tech Policy Hub, might not apply to the dead.
We’re entering a world where we need to think about privacy after death. About generative artificial intelligence and what it can do with our words, faces, and memories once we’re gone.