Deceased User Data: Management and Privacy in the AI Era
Deceased user data and the right to privacy have become a central issue in the age of artificial intelligence. The management of deceased user data raises increasingly pressing ethical, legal, and technological questions for families, businesses, and digital platforms.
The amount of personal information that remains online after a person's death grows year after year. Social media profiles, search histories, chats, multimedia content, cloud service accounts: all these elements make up a veritable "post-mortem digital heritage" that must be regulated. Who can decide what is retained, what is obscured, and what must be permanently deleted?
Recent discussions about the role of large tech companies in data obscuration after users' deaths bring the issue of digital sovereignty back to the forefront. In particular, the massive use of data by data protection systems artificial intelligence Generative analytics makes managing deceased user data even more challenging, because that content can continue to influence models, responses, and recommendations even after the person has passed away.
In this scenario, clear guidelines, digital legacy settings, and tools to empower citizens to control their informational destiny become crucial. At the same time, brands and companies must rethink their approach to data collection, retention, and deletion, integrating transparent policies and automated procedures.
Deceased User Data: Regulatory Framework and Digital Rights
When talking about deceased user data, the first regulatory reference for those who operate in Europe is the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The GDPR protects the personal data of natural persons, but leaves room for interpretation regarding the handling of information after death, often leaving it up to Member States to define specific rules.
In Italy, the Privacy Code provides that certain rights may also be exercised by heirs or other interested parties after the data subject's death. This means that family members may, under certain conditions, request access to, rectification of, or deletion of deceased users' data from the data controllers.
At the same time, many online services have introduced tools dedicated to managing digital inheritance. For example, some social networks allow you to nominate a contact as your heir or request that your account be transformed into a memorialized profile. Others allow for the automatic deletion of accounts after a certain period of inactivity, a measure also designed to manage deceased user data.
The lack of uniform global rules, however, creates significant inconsistencies. A citizen can have accounts on platforms with registered offices in different countries, each with its own policies and different deadlines. This makes it difficult for families to understand how to proceed, and for companies to establish secure procedures that respect the original user's wishes.
Who decides on deceased user data: individual, family, or platform?
The central question is: who has the actual right to decide what happens to the deceased user dataIn theory, the first person who should be able to decide is the user themselves, while they're alive. Through privacy settings, digital wills, or terms of service, users can determine the fate of their content after death.
In practice, however, few users actually configure these settings consciously. As a result, the responsibility often falls on family members, who find themselves managing deceased user accounts and data at an emotionally delicate time. It's not always clear which credentials can be used, which documents are required, and what restrictions local law imposes.
Digital platforms, for their part, are taking an increasingly active role. They can decide to automatically anonymize or obscure deceased user data after an official notification, or implement death verification processes based on the presentation of certificates. This makes them de facto arbiters in the balance between the right to digital memory and the right to be forgotten.
Another critical issue concerns the use of deceased user data to train artificial intelligence models. If a model was trained on public content produced by a deceased person, to what extent is it permissible to continue using that information? Some digital ethicists argue that a principle of data minimization and posthumous respect should apply, especially when dealing with sensitive data or private conversations.
Deceased User Data and Generative Artificial Intelligence
With the explosion of generative AI systems, the question of deceased user data takes on a new dimension. Large linguistic and multimodal models are fed by enormous datasets that include text, images, audio, and video shared online over many years. These datasets may include, even indirectly, deceased user data from forums, blogs, social media, and messaging platforms.
The main challenge is traceability: once the data has been aggregated and used to train a model, it becomes complex to selectively remove information relating to individual subjects, especially when dealing with millions of records. Some companies are studying techniques machine unlearning, which aim to “unlearn” specific portions of the data, but we are still in a pioneering phase.
Ethical guidelines recommend avoiding the use of particularly sensitive data in datasets and implementing strong anonymization mechanisms. However, even when deceased user data is not directly identifiable, it can continue to influence the behavior of models, contributing to the generation of similar content or the extraction of statistical patterns.
A more responsible approach could include defining clear policies regarding data retention and use, with the option of explicitly excluding deceased user data from future training phases. This is intertwined with the development of regulations such as European AI Act, which aims to regulate high-risk artificial intelligence systems and ensure greater transparency on the data used.
Deceased User Data: Impact on Marketing and Business
The management of the deceased user data It has a direct impact on digital marketing, customer experience, and brand reputation. Companies that use contact databases for promotional campaigns, remarketing, or automation risk sending communications to numbers or addresses belonging to deceased individuals, causing distress to family members and damaging their reputation.
For marketing teams, this means rethinking data update and cleansing workflows. Integrations with CRM systems, marketing automation platforms, and messaging channels must include clear rules for managing reports related to deceased users. For example, if a response arrives from a family member reporting a death, the contact should be immediately flagged and removed from active lists.
Furthermore, the widespread use of analytics and behavioral profiling requires an ethical approach, even in the long term. Deceased user data should not continue to significantly influence segmentations, lookalike audiences, or predictive models, especially when alternatives based on up-to-date data and current consensus exist.
For brands that communicate through conversational channels like WhatsApp Business, email, and social messaging, it's crucial to establish processes for verifying and regularly updating their databases. Careful management of deceased user data isn't just a legal requirement, it's also a sign of respect for individuals and their families, strengthening brand trust.
Finally, companies developing or integrating AI solutions must evaluate how their models handle historical data. Adopting limited retention policies, advanced anonymization, and periodic dataset audits can reduce the risk of misuse of deceased user data while simultaneously improving the overall quality of predictions and recommendations.
How SendApp Can Help with Deceased User Data
In the context of conversational communication, a platform like SendApp can support companies in the responsible management of deceased user data, especially when using WhatsApp Business as your primary customer relationship channel. Centralizing conversations and automating workflows makes it easier to systematically update and clean your databases.
With SendApp Official, which integrates with the official WhatsApp APIs, businesses can structure clear opt-out and consent management processes, including specific cases related to deceased user data. For example, it's possible to configure automatic processes that, upon notification from a family member, mark the contact as inactive and exclude them from all future campaigns.
SendApp Agent It allows you to organize the work of support and sales teams across multiple agents. This facilitates the sensitive handling of conversations involving important personal situations, such as the death of a customer. Agents can follow shared procedures to update the CRM and handle deceased user data respectfully and in compliance with company policies.
For those who need to scale automation, SendApp Cloud It offers advanced workflow, tagging, and segmentation features. Companies can create automated rules that take deceased user data into account, such as blocking broadcasts to contacts tagged with certain tags or activating triggers that alert the DPO or data protection officer for any necessary investigations.
SendApp's integration with external systems also allows for real-time synchronization of profile changes, reducing the risk of deceased user data remaining active in some channels. This way, respect for the individual and regulatory compliance become an integral part of WhatsApp communication strategies and marketing automation processes.
Companies looking to implement a more mature approach to data management, including deceased user data, can request a dedicated consultation and test the platform in real-world scenarios. Visit the website SendApp You can explore available solutions, evaluate plans, and start a guided trial to optimize your use of WhatsApp Business in a secure, compliant, and customer-centric way throughout your digital lifecycle.
