In the pre-digital era, passing away meant leaving behind tangible belongings, including houses, jewellery, bank accounts, and perhaps a shoebox of letters and photographs. Today, your “estate” is far less tangible but far more sprawling. From Google Drive to your Instagram archive, from UPI transaction histories to cryptocurrency wallets, your entire life is now scattered across servers you don’t own.
But what happens to it after you’re gone? Who decides whether your photos are deleted or memorialized? Can someone legally claim your digital assets in India or are they trapped in an algorithm’s black box?
This is the uneasy terrain of digital legacy, and India is only just starting to have the conversation.
Life in Data
Your digital presence extends far beyond social media posts. It includes:
- Personal communications: Emails, WhatsApp messages, and chat histories.
- Financial assets: Paytm balances, demat accounts, crypto wallets, and online banking credentials.
- Creative works: Blogs, digital art, music files, and e-books.
- Subscriptions & Licenses: OTT accounts, paid software, and domain names.
- Biometric data: Face IDs, fingerprints, and medical records from wearables.
All of this, if left unaccounted for, can vanish, be exploited, or remain in limbo after you pass away.
The Indian Legal Blind Spot
Unlike countries like the US (where tech giants like Google and Apple offer clear “legacy contact” features) or the EU (with GDPR-driven posthumous rights in certain jurisdictions), India has no comprehensive Digital Inheritance Law.
Currently, your digital assets fall under a patchwork of frameworks:
- Indian Succession Act, 1925 – governs inheritance of “property” but does not explicitly cover digital assets.
- Information Technology Act, 2000 – offers general provisions for data protection, but nothing specific to posthumous rights.
- Platform-specific terms of service – which often override any national legal framework. For example, most social media accounts are “licensed,” not “owned,” meaning you can’t pass them down like you would a bank account.
The Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) has hinted at exploring data wills as part of future data protection frameworks, but no draft law exists yet.
The Cost of Dying Online
Digital legacy isn’t just emotional or legal, it’s also financial. When someone passes away without planning for their online estate, survivors may face hidden costs:
- Paid subscriptions: Streaming, cloud storage, SaaS tools, and domain renewals keep charging long after death if not cancelled.
- Digital businesses: Freelancers who run blogs, YouTube channels, or online stores may leave behind revenue streams with no access credentials.
- Crypto & fintech apps: Billions of rupees in crypto are already estimated to be “lost forever” because private keys died with their owners.
- Data recovery services: Families sometimes pay private cyber-forensics firms hefty fees to unlock old accounts or recover hard drives.
Globally, the “digital death economy” is now spawning new industries. Companies in the US and Europe offer subscription-based digital estate planning, AI-driven “memorial bots” that mimic your online voice, and secure vaults for storing digital wills. India hasn’t yet caught up, but a few startups in Bengaluru and Gurugram are exploring password escrow and “afterlife planning services.”
This raises an uncomfortable question: is digital immortality a right, or just another business model?
Platform Power: Who Really Decides Your Legacy?
For now, tech platforms have more control over your afterlife than any Indian court does.
- Facebook allows accounts to be “memorialised” or deleted if a legacy contact is assigned.
- Google’s Inactive Account Manager lets you pre-decide who gets your data after inactivity.
- Apple’s Digital Legacy (available in India since iOS 15.2) enables the sharing of account access with a few trusted people after death.
- Crypto exchanges vary wildly, some require a court order; others have no clear India-specific policy.
But here’s the catch: these features are opt-in. If you don’t proactively set them up, your data fate is decided by a terms-of-service agreement you probably didn’t read.
Data Wills: The Missing Piece
A data will is a legal document specifying how your digital assets should be handled after your death—whom to grant access to, which accounts to delete, and where to store access credentials.
In India, while you can include digital assets in a traditional will, lawyers recommend adding a separate annex for:
- Account details and associated email IDs
- Location of digital wallets and recovery phrases
- Instructions for memorialising or deleting accounts
- Legal consent for data transfer to heirs
Digital estate planning is now a niche legal service in metros, but awareness is still low. Without such planning, families are left in prolonged negotiations with tech companies—often without success.
The Privacy Twist
Ironically, while families may want access to your data for closure, the same data can be used for identity theft, financial fraud, or even AI training without your consent.
Facial recognition models can be trained on images from memorialised social accounts. Voice samples stored in cloud backups could feed into deepfake technology. And your medical history from wearables could be mined for predictive health algorithms.
In short: your afterlife is valuable—to both loved ones and strangers.
Where India Goes From Here
Experts suggest three urgent steps:
- Legislation – A Digital Inheritance Bill to clearly define rights, responsibilities, and processes.
- Standardisation – Uniform rules across platforms operating in India.
- Awareness Campaigns – Educating citizens about legacy settings and data wills.
Globally, jurisdictions like France give heirs the legal right to access personal data, while in Germany, the Federal Court of Justice ruled that a deceased person’s Facebook messages could be inherited like letters. India could draw from these precedents.
Your Afterlife Checklist
Until the law catches up, here’s what you can do now:
- Assign legacy contacts on major platforms.
- Maintain an encrypted password vault accessible to a trusted person.
- Add digital asset clauses in your will.
- Use multi-factor authentication to protect against posthumous hacking.
The big question remains: In a world where our lives are increasingly datafied, should our afterlife be ours to control—or is it just another dataset for corporations to monetise?
As of now, your digital legacy in India is less about what you want and more about what the platforms decide. Unless laws and user action align, your afterlife may belong to the cloud, not your kin.
