Using deceased people’s personal data

Abstract

It is important to manage individuals’ personal data after their death to maintain their dignity or follow their wishes as much as possible. From this perspective, this report describes the real-world commercialization of immortal digital personalities, which gives eternal life to the deceased in a digital form. We identify the problems with the commercialization of deceased users’ images and personal data, which becomes postmortem entertainment. Considering these problems, we seek out the ideal form of deceased users’ personal data for commercialization. We conduct a social survey to understand how ordinary Japanese people feel about the various types of publicly available services that use personal data after death, such as social network service logs. By analyzing our survey results approximately 20% of respondents would allow the commercial use of their personal data, such as browsing their social network service logs, if they could receive compensation during their lifetime.

Chatting with the dead: The hermeneutics of thanabots

“…It is always ready, able, and willing to engage. This servility is currently more often than not forced, as the deceased have usually not given explicit permission for their data to be used as the basis for a thanabot; recent studies show that individuals remain skeptical of their personal data being used for potentially financially profitable initiatives like thanabot development (Nakagawa and Orita, 2022). As scholars continue to debate the ethics of identifying individual people in archival and/or digital datasets – which themselves ‘serve as material reminders that machine cultures rely on scattered human remains’ (Thylstrup, 2022: 663) – we must too consider the ethics of identifying, and ultimately amplifying, individual people by turning them into thanabots and thereby reintegrating them into digital communications networks.…”

Creating a large language model of a philosopher

“…For this reason, at least until the law is settled, we recommend seeking the explicit permission of the author before fine‐tuning on an individual author's copyrighted text or publishing any of the outputs. How to deal with works by deceased authors should also be considered (Nakagawa & Orita, 2022). One possibility is to legally enforce labeling LLM outputs as such to curb abuses such as academic fraud, propaganda, and spam (e.g., the current AI‐act draft, a proposed EU law [European Commission, 2021] requires the labeling of anything that might be mistaken for human interaction).…”

Relâmpagos de Saudade: Aplicativo móvel para homenagens póstumas

“…Como base para criação dos requisitos, inicialmente foi feito um estudo bibliográfico no campo da pesquisa [Ueda and Maciel 2021, Nakagawa and Orita 2022,] e em engenharia de software [Barbosa et al 2022, Sommerville 2011, Pressman and Maxim 2021. Ainda, foram feitas pesquisas específicas em lojas de aplicativos, conforme supracitado.…”