Dead Men Tell No Tales: Assessing Post-Mortem Data Protection in GenAI Chatbots

Generative AI (GenAI) systems and chatbots rely on vast corpora of consumer data. The use of such data for training GenAI has raised concerns around data ownership, copyright issues, and potential harm to consumers. In this work, we explore a related but less examined angle: the ownership and privacy of data originating from deceased individuals. We propose three post mortem data management principles to guide the protection of deceased individual's data, and analyze popular GenAI chatbots policies and answers to legacy requests. We plan to systematically audit consumer GenAI chatbots on their behavior regarding post-mortem data management