Postmortem privacy paper exposes global divides in handling dead people's data

In a new paper posted on arXiv (2608.16905), legal scholar Mauricio Figueroa tackles a rarely examined but increasingly urgent issue: how societies govern the digital data of the dead. Titled "The politics of postmortem privacy," the study goes beyond simply acknowledging that deceased individuals have privacy claims. Instead, Figueroa exposes critical instabilities in the concept—its scope, its moral justifications, and its wildly uneven application across legal systems. The result is a framework that reveals these tensions as "the politics of postmortem privacy," showing how laws and norms around digital remains are far from neutral.

Figueroa organizes the analysis around three geographic and political loci. First, the transatlantic divide: European jurisdictions like the EU tend to anchor protection in human dignity and data protection law, while US approaches lean on property rights and individual control, leading to very different outcomes. Second, intra-European tensions, where EU GDPR principles clash with national laws on archives, memorials, and family access. Third—and most critically—postcolonial and post-authoritarian contexts in the Global South, where historical colonial data practices and transitional justice priorities shape how the dead are remembered and dignified. The paper contends that this last region has been neglected in privacy scholarship, even though it carries the deepest stakes. By assembling legal scholarship with cultural and historical observations, Figueroa argues that postmortem privacy is not a static right but a productive register through which societies negotiate memory, dignity, and the governance of information flows about the dead. The work has immediate relevance for platform designers, data custodians, and policymakers building systems that must handle identity and data long after a user's death.