मौत के बाद डिजिटल पहचान ‘जिंदा’ कर सकता है डेटा: इसे रोकने की तैयारी नहीं; यूजर्स कंपनी पर दबाव बनाएं

Carl Oman

These days a large part of our life is online. But no one has an answer to what will happen to our data or digital traces when we are no longer in this world… This is what Prof. Karl Oman of Uppsala University, Sweden says. In the book ‘The Afterlife of Data…’ Oman has written that our digital identity can be recreated after death from the traces left by us.

They investigate what to do with this data? Is our digital life our own? If not, who has the right to decide what happens to our data? They have tried to find solutions, Read…

Data can be used to train AI models

During my study, I calculated that in three to four decades, there will be more dead people on Facebook than living users. This is a big challenge for those social media companies who depend on us to click on ads. Because dead people will not click on ads. This is a serious threat to the economy based on advertising.

Concern: People like Musk and Zuckerberg will decide how to understand the past

The concern is also greater because AI technology is enabling us to ‘talk’ to the dead. Amazon is working on a feature that would allow its virtual assistant Alexa to be programmed to speak in the voice of a dead relative.

Startups are using the data to create chatbots of the dead. Since dead people do not have the right to data privacy, this data can be of commercial value as training data for AI models.

Companies can sell it to descendants in a kind of ‘legacy as a service’ deal. Whoever controls this data will have no control over how it is used. For example, Elon Musk now owns all the tweets related to the Me Too campaign.

That is, when future historians try to understand the past, people like Musk and Zuckerberg will have the right to set the terms. They can delete the entire data. Because it will be an expensive deal for them to handle it. Companies have no preparation for this.

Wat can be done…

Social media companies or any single person should not have the rights to our digital remains. It should be ensured that this data can be destroyed in a systematic manner after our death. Just as UNESCO sets rules for world heritage, similar rules should be made for data as well. Archives can be created, this will ensure that no one person will have control. The infrastructure for this should be in place within a decade or else it will be too late.