Written by Aditri Gupta,
Nirma University,
June 2026
Introduction
International commerce today does not merely travel across oceans in ships as it also travels across servers, cloud platforms, and blockchain networks. A person’s digital presence has become as real and as valuable as any physical asset they may own. Yet when that person dies, Indian law offers almost no guidance on what happens next.
Consider a young professional who unexpectedly passes away, leaving behind a cryptocurrency wallet, a monetised YouTube channel, years of family photographs stored on cloud servers, and private messages spanning a decade. His family cannot access the photographs. The cryptocurrency may be lost forever. The platform refuses to hand over account credentials. No Indian statute tells them what to do.
This is the problem of digital legacy and it is no longer a future concern like with over 900 million internet users a booming creator economy and widespread adoption of digital financial instruments, India urgently needs a legal framework for what happens to digital assets after death.
Understanding Digital Legacy
A digital legacy refers to the entirety of a person’s digital presence and assets that survive after their death. This includes several distinct categories.
Financial assets include cryptocurrency, domain names and monetised online businesses. Personal assets include cloud-stored photographs, emails, and private messages. Creative assets include blogs, digital artwork , music and YouTube channels. Identity assets include social media profiles, which represent a person’s public persona and reputation. Finally some emerging category includes AI-generated assets like voice models and personality replicas trained on the deceased person’s own data.
Each category carries distinct value. Cryptocurrency may be worth lakhs of rupees. Family photographs may be emotionally irreplaceable and social media archive is in a meaningful sense a self-portrait. The law must treat each differently and currently treats none of them at all.
The Indian Legal Landscape
Information Technology Act, 2000
The Information Technology Act, 2000[1] is the foundational statute of Indian cyber law. It governs electronic records, digital signatures and cyber transactions. However it was drafted entirely with living users in mind. Death is a legal nullity in its framework there are no provisions for post-death access to electronic records like for example no mechanism for digital inheritance and no recognition of heirs as rights-holders in digital spaces.
Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023
The Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023[2] takes one step forward. Section 14 allows a Data Principal to nominate someone to exercise their data rights after death or incapacity. This is a genuine acknowledgment that data rights do not simply vanish at death.
However, the provision is incomplete. It requires affirmative nomination during the person’s lifetime those who die without making one are left entirely uncovered. It defines no authority for the nominee: may they access the data delete it or transfer it? The Act does not say and even there is no posthumous privacy framework and no digital inheritance mechanism. The statute was built around a living consenting individual and it stops making sense the moment that individual dies.
Succession Laws
The Indian Succession Act, 1925[3] governs the transfer of property after death. It was designed for physical assets like land, jewellery, bank accounts. Digital assets resist these categories at every point.
Cryptocurrency is secured by a private key. If the owner dies without recording it, the asset is permanently and mathematically inaccessible no succession certificate, no court order and no legal mechanism can retrieve it. A domain name is a contractual right with a registrar not a property interest in the traditional sense. A monetised YouTube channel may be explicitly non-transferable under platform terms. Whether a platform’s contract can override a testamentary bequest has never been litigated in India.
Judicial Developments: The Shaishav Shah Case
In early 2026, the Gujarat High Court delivered a landmark ruling in Shaishav Shah v. Apple Inc[4].The facts were straightforward: the deceased’s family sought access to his iCloud account containing personal photographs and documents. Apple declined without a court order.
The court granted the family’s petition. It was held that personal data stored in cloud services forms part of a deceased person’s estate and that legal heirs have a cognisable right to access it. It further held that the right to privacy does not survive death in a manner that would block legitimate succession claims, and that platform terms of service cannot defeat those claims.
The ruling is significant as it is the first clear judicial recognition that digital data forms part of an estate and that platforms cannot hide behind their own contracts. However it answers only the access question. Ownership of financial digital assets, posthumous privacy, and the governance of AI-generated identities remain entirely open.
Global Perspectives
There are two international models offer useful comparison.The United States enacted the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act (RUFADAA), which creates a clear hierarchy: platform legacy tools take precedence, followed by a will, followed by default statutory rules. It empowers a ‘digital fiduciary’ an executor with statutory authority to access and manage digital accounts.
In Germany, the Bundesgerichtshof held in 2018 that digital accounts are heritable contracts and that heirs are entitled to access them, while protecting the privacy of third parties who had communicated with the deceased.
India needs elements of both approaches: access rights for heirs, and privacy protections for the deceased. Neither model translates directly into Indian law, but together they demonstrate that this legislation is achievable and also that India’s delay is increasingly difficult to justify.
The Four Pillars of Digital Afterlife Rights
A coherent Indian framework should rest on four pillars.
Ownership requires the formal recognition of digital assets as heritable property. Where platform contracts conflict with succession rights, statute must prevail. Holders of significant digital financial instruments should be required to maintain accessible credential records for the benefit of executors and heirs.
Access requires the creation of a Digital Executor nominated in a will or court-appointed in its absence with statutory authority to access, manage, and close digital accounts. Platforms must be legally obligated to respond within defined timeframes, with penalties for non-compliance.
Privacy requires a qualified posthumous privacy right grounded in constitutional dignity. Financial and publicly shared content should be freely accessible to heirs. Intimate personal communications should require court authorisation. Legally privileged communications should remain permanently inaccessible. These protections should operate for a defined period after death.
Legacy requires regulation of AI resurrection technologies. Voice clones, personality models, and digital avatars of deceased persons should be permitted only with their advance consent expressed in a digital will or with unanimous heir consent. Commercial exploitation of a deceased person’s simulated identity without consent should be an actionable wrong.
Recommendations
India’s reform agenda should proceed on the following lines: first, a Digital Assets (Succession) Act recognizing digital property as heritable; second, statutory recognition of digital wills with simplified formality requirements; third, a Digital Executor framework expanding Section 14 of the DPDPA; fourth, posthumous privacy rules enforced by the Data Protection Board; fifth, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology regulations on AI resurrection and sixth mandatory platform obligations toward legal heirs.
Conclusion
India has navigated complex legal transitions before from colonial property law to constitutional rights, from paper contracts to electronic commerce. The transition to digital succession law is the next frontier.
A person’s digital legacy is not merely property. It is memory identity and the record of a life. The Supreme Court’s recognition of privacy as a fundamental right in K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India [5]reflects a constitutional commitment to dignity. That commitment does not expire at death.
India’s courts have begun to speak. Parliament must follow. Digital Afterlife Rights very grounded in ownership, access, privacy, and legacy are not a distant aspiration. They are an immediate constitutional obligation that Indian law can no longer postpone.
References
[1] The Information Technology Act, 2000, § 43 (India).
[2] Digital Personal Data Protection Act, No. 22 of 2023, India Code (2023).
[3] The Indian Succession Act, No. 39 of 1925, India Code (1925).
[4] Sadhna Shaishav Shah v. Nil, 2026 SCC OnLine Dis Crt (Guj) 1.
[5] Justice K.S. Puttaswamy (Retd.) v. Union of India, (2017) 10 S.C.C. 1