From bones to bytes: anticipating and addressing the governance challenges of human digital remains and posthumous digital human twins

During the nineteenth century, advances in medical research led to grave robbing and an illicit market in human biological remains (HBR). The historical episode of grave robbing illustrates how science can upend social norms. A similar scenario could soon emerge, but this time it will not be with people's biological remains, but with people's digital remains. Artificial intelligence and extended reality now create digital representations from avatars to human digital twins. In addition to the sophisticated digital appearance, the representations are drawing on personal and biometric data to create complex behavioural and biological replications of people. These digital artefacts form part of a person's digital estate, which persists after death as Human Digital Remains (HDR). HDR presents an urgent socio-technological risk because like the 19th-century trade in HBR, HDR presents existing legal and ethical gaps. The research responds by adopting what is to our knowledge, the first of its kind cross-disciplinary study that combines conceptual analysis, anticipatory and precautionary governance frameworks, and doctrinal review to analyse and anticipate legal and ethical gaps and grey areas. Our analysis shows that neither General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) nor the AI Act (2025) currently extends rights to the deceased. In response, we outline a HDR governance framework, supported by six targeted policy-facingrecommendations: (1) build HDR-specific anticipatory governance capacity, (2) innovate and safeguard posthumous privacy and data protections, (3) protect citizen autonomy with advance data directives and data trustees, (4) leverage existing tools by developing a data-donor card and support the right to gift or trade HDR, (5) enhance the right to be forgotten post-mortem, and (6) update digital identity and legacy rights, including the right to continuation or erasure of Digital Human Twins.