University of Birmingham
By Adam Green
February 5th, 2026
Our digital legacies are creating new and potentially troubling questions about autonomy and dignity after death.
Alongside traditional estates, we now leave behind digital remains after we die, from social media accounts and emails to AI-generated recreations of ourselves. As technology continues to evolve, the questions surrounding digital remains will only grow more pressing.
Dr. Edina Harbinja, Associate Professor of Law at the University of Birmingham, is spearheading a pioneering initiative to modernize European law to respond to novel questions about access, inheritance and privacy.
The challenge now is ensuring the law catches up to make that control a reality.
A leading expert in the field of digital succession, Dr. Harbinja defines personal digital remains as personal data under the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation or identity-related representations of the deceased. This definition captures not just our digital accounts and files, but technologies like “grief bots” or “ghost bots” which use a deceased person’s digital footprint to replicate them.
