As digital life now extends beyond our lifespans, most societies remain unprepared for what happens when people die or become incapacitated, leaving behind their online assets. A comprehensive new research paper is now open for public comment:  "The Unfinished Digital Estate: Culture, Law, and Technology After Death." This paper, published by the OpenID Foundation, addresses the growing complexity of digital estate management, moving beyond traditional financial assets to encompass the full spectrum of our digital lives – from our email accounts, shared photos, and creative work to the emergent class of AI-generated content that may both perform and outlive us.

This research builds on stakeholder input, including perspectives from estate planning attorneys and families who have navigated digital loss. It further acknowledges those dealing with cross-cultural estate management and emphasizes that solutions must respect cultural diversity while providing practical frameworks for the digital afterlife. It is accompanied by a draft Planning Guide, which is also open for public comment and offers practical tools without intending to replace qualified legal advice. 

The paper has been developed by OpenID Foundation members Dean H. Saxe, Mike Kiser and Heather Flanagan, who are long-time contributors to digital identity standards. The work – particularly the Planning Guide – was supported by the Death and the Digital Estate Community Group (DADE CG). The DADE CG will continue to drive implementation of the paper's recommendations and advocate for standards development in digital estate management.

Policymakers, technologists, legal scholars, estate planning professionals, digital rights advocates – and people with online lives – are invited to offer feedback on this paper, which explores the scale of this global problem. Specifically:

• Growing digital legacy crisis - Increasing deaths leave behind substantial digital estates including creative work, social profiles, and connected devices that most legal systems, technology platforms, and cultural traditions cannot properly manage, creating significant family impact.
• Cultural death perspectives - Different cultural approaches to death fundamentally shape how digital estate planning is understood and implemented across societies.
• Stakeholders and risks - The paper identifies who faces exposure and what's lost when digital estate planning fails or remains inadequate.
• Existing governance gaps - Current systems for managing death, incapacitation, and delegation work inconsistently, fall short in key areas, and resist uniform policy solutions.
• Technical tool limitations - Available digital estate management tools remain inconsistent, incomplete, and largely controlled by proprietary platforms.
• Identity delegation complexity - Digital estate planning extends beyond asset transfer to encompass delegation of identity, authority, and agency, requiring careful attention to semantics, standards, and threat models.
• AI and digital representation - Generative AI creates new possibilities for digital presence after death while raising fundamental questions about digital humanity.
• Implementation framework - Lawmakers, standards bodies, and implementers need scalable systems that protect individual autonomy while accommodating cultural diversity.

This paper was commissioned by the OpenID Foundation Board in April 2025 after extensive community consultation at IIW, EIC, Identiverse, and other public forums over the course of two years. It follows the Foundation's standard whitepaper development process.

Your feedback will help ensure this paper serves as a strong foundation for policy development and industry standards in digital estate management. We particularly welcome input from estate planning professionals, platform operators, privacy advocates, and those from diverse cultural backgrounds who can speak to varied traditions around death and inheritance.

The comment period will be open until Friday, October 24th. You may submit your feedback to director@oidf.org. Please use this template and reference specific line numbers for your proposed changes, where appropriate. Furthermore, the editors would appreciate referrals and links to digital legacy management tools or platforms that may be worth including in the final document.

We will share the final outcomes and recommendations at digital identity and estate planning conferences throughout 2025-26 and look forward to further community discussion on the findings before the paper moves to final later this year.

About the OpenID Foundation

The OpenID Foundation (OIDF) is a global open standards body committed to helping people assert their identity wherever they choose. Founded in 2007, we are a community of technical experts leading the creation of open identity standards that are secure, interoperable, and privacy preserving. The Foundation’s OpenID Connect standard is now used by billions of people across millions of applications. In the last five years, the Financial Grade API has become the standard of choice for Open Banking and Open Data implementations, allowing people to access and share data across entities. Today, the OpenID Foundation’s standards are the connective tissue to enable people to assert their identity and access their data at scale, the scale of the internet, enabling “networks of networks” to interoperate globally. Individuals, companies, governments and non-profits are encouraged to join or participate. Find out more at openid.net.