The digital inheritance issue: Who owns your data after you are gone?

When Professor Richard Scolyer died on 7 June 2026 after three years with glioblastoma, Australia lost a pioneering cancer researcher. The pathologist – joint 2024 Australian of the Year with oncologist Georgina Long – used his own diagnosis to advance science, volunteering as the test subject for a world-first experimental treatment that generated data to inform future brain-cancer therapies.

His case shows that a person’s data can outlive them. But Professor Scolyer chose his legacy – he decided what his data was for and whom it would help. Most people do not have or make this choice. Instead, we leave our digital lives scattered across accounts we do not control, and when we die, a platform may decide what becomes of them.

A legal framework focused on the living

In Vietnam, the problem already has a face. In 2025, a popular social media and messaging app used by millions of Vietnamese people drew criticism for erasing the message history of inactive accounts. Among the objectors were bereaved families, who had lost their final conversations with the dead. Later that year, the app expanded its data collection without offering partial consent. Regulators later fined its operator 810 million VND for failing to give users a genuine choice to consent or refuse.

However, current regulations only protect the data privacy of the living, as RMIT Vietnam PhD candidate in Computer Science Mai Tat Dat notes.

“A dead person cannot consent, refuse, or revoke. The clock simply runs out, and what becomes of their photos, voice messages and the record of a life is decided by the platform’s terms, not by the person, the family, or the law,” he says.

Mr Dat points out that this is only the visible edge. A deceased person now leaves behind email and cloud accounts, social media profiles, e-wallets, crypto wallets, online business records, hospital data and health readings from apps and wearables. Some hold real wealth. Others hold family memories. Some contain private messages involving other living people. And others can be used by AI to recreate the person’s voice, face or writing style.

“The value of these so-called ‘digital remains’ is obvious. The rules are not,” he says.

Vietnam has recently modernised its data protection regime. The Law of Personal Data Protection and its guiding Decree 356/2025/ND-CP, both effective from 1 January 2026, now impose stricter rules on sensitive personal data, including health, biometric and financial information.

However, the law only polices consent among the living and says nothing about the dead. “Why should your right to privacy end at death? Can heirs access a deceased person’s data? Must platforms cooperate? May hospitals disclose records? Should private messages stay sealed? None of these questions currently has an answer in the law,” Mr Dat says.

Digital wills, not password lists

The most practical starting point is a legally recognised digital will, Mr Dat suggests. Operating alongside a traditional will, it would record binding instructions about access, deletion, preservation and transfer of data.

A person could direct that family photos pass to their children, private messages remain sealed, cryptocurrency recovery instructions go to a trusted person, and no AI version of their voice or image ever be created.

A digital executor, named in the will, would deal with platforms, banks and hospitals and see those instructions carried out with identity verification and audit trails, so the right person gets the right data for the right purpose.

The importance of a digital will becomes highly visible in financial assets and health data – two areas where access and privacy raise different challenges.

In Vietnam, where crypto asset ownership is among the highest in the world, with around 20% of the population owning crypto, the risks are particularly acute. With common types of bank assets, banks can usually verify a deceased customer and process an inheritance claim after some time. However, self-custody cryptocurrency often works differently: access depends on a private key or seed phrase known only to the owner, and no court order can recover a secret key that no one knows. This means that an heir may hold a valid legal claim to an asset that is technically unrecoverable.

Health data present a different challenge, not of access, but of privacy. According to RMIT PhD candidate in Psychology and medical doctor Nguyen Thi Dang Thu, “Confidentiality does not end at death. A doctor stays bound to a dead patient's secrets. And more of it now lives outside the hospital,” she says.

She explains that a smartwatch now logs years of heart rhythms, sleep and stress; a phone tracks cycles, weight and mood – intimate readings no doctor ever sees, held under a platform's terms rather than any rule of medical confidentiality. Yet the data is partly the family's too, because it reveals the inherited risks they carry. For example, does a daughter inherit the right to read her mother's medical file to learn what health risks may be coming for her?

“Vietnam's new Law on Personal Data Protection already treats health information as sensitive and demands explicit consent. That consent should survive death, not dissolve into automatic family access or open-ended research,” Dr Thu suggests. “Like organ donation, these records should serve kin and medicine only when the person chose it, never by default.”

The right to recreate a person

AI raises another big question: can family members inherit the right to recreate a person? Photos, voice notes, messages and posts are now enough to build a cloned voice, a video, or a chatbot that talks like the deceased. A private family memorial raises one set of concerns, but Mr Dat argues that commercial or political uses raise far graver ones.

Scholars have warned that the digital afterlife industry creates ethical risks around dignity, consent and control after death. But the raw material is already being licensed. Major platforms’ terms of service routinely grant sweeping rights to use, edit, compile, improve current products or create derivative products from content users share. Most companies promise to seek explicit consent before training AI on personal data, but that consent is often switched on by default or buried deep in the settings or lengthy user agreements.

Some jurisdictions are starting to respond. The US state of New York now requires disclosure of synthetic replicas and recognises post-mortem rights over a person’s digital likeness.

“The default should be simple: no AI recreation without explicit prior consent, recorded in a digital will or equivalent instruction,” Mr Dat argues.

A framework, not a patchwork

Vietnam does not need to invent its digital life inheritance laws from scratch, according to RMIT PhD candidate in Computer Science Pham Viet Thai.

France offers a clear model: individuals can issue general or service-specific post-mortem directives – binding instructions on the preservation, deletion or disclosure of their data after death – and where none exist, verified heirs may step in, with disputes settled by the courts.

Big platforms have built partial fixes too: Apple users can now name a Legacy Contact and Google users can set up an Inactive Account Manager to give family members access to certain account data after they have passed away.

Yet much of the region – including developed economies like South Korea and Japan – has yet to enact dedicated digital-inheritance laws, Mr Thai points out. He suggests that Vietnam could lead the region rather than follow it by designing a framework fitted to its own legal system, digital economy and culture.

“Vietnam’s next legal challenge is to decide what digital remains are: data to be protected, property to be inherited, memory to be preserved, or identity to be respected. They are not the same thing, and they should not be governed as if they were,” Mr Thai says.

“What people leave behind no longer sits only in homes, bank accounts and land registries. It lives in the cloud – and it deserves rules before the disputes arrive.”

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