Legal Framework & Privacy

Primary sources for the claims on this page:

• IP Australia 2026 Report, Figure 2.6 lead domestic filers, Idy Pty Ltd ranked second

• The Conversation, Wellett Potter (UNE Law), the consent-first legal framing

The legal question for an AI digital twin service is not whether such a service is permissible but on what terms. Afterlife AI™ operates simultaneously under several legal regimes, all of which are currently evolving. The service is built to comply with each and to remain compliant as the law develops.

Australia

Afterlife AI™ is operated by IDY™ Pty Ltd, an Australian company based in New South Wales (ABN 22 688 561 042). The service complies with the Australian Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) and the Australian Privacy Principles (APPs). The Privacy Officer can be contacted at privacy@idy.ai.

Australian law does not currently protect a person's identity, voice, presence, values or personality as such. There is no general publicity or personality right of the kind that exists in many US states. This means Australian citizens do not have a legal right to own or control their identity (the use of their voice, image or likeness) in the abstract. The unique things that make you you are not, in Australian law, your property. The Conversation article by Wellett Potter explains this gap in detail and is the most authoritative recent Australian analysis. Afterlife AI™ is built within this constraint, and beyond it. The service does not rely solely on personality rights for its consent structure. It uses contract, encryption and Executor Lock™ to make the consent enforceable in practice, regardless of whether Australian law catches up to the category.

European Economic Area (EU and EEA)

For EEA users the service operates under the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Personal data processing is grounded in explicit, informed and revocable consent under Article 6(1)(a). Special-category data processing (voice recordings, facial images and emotional metadata) is grounded in Article 9(2)(a). Data subject rights under Articles 15 to 22 are honoured, including access, rectification, erasure, restriction of processing, portability and the right to object. International transfers to non-EEA jurisdictions are governed by Standard Contractual Clauses where applicable. The full GDPR lawful-basis table is in the Afterlife AI™ Privacy Policy.

United Kingdom

For UK users the service complies with the UK Data Protection Act 2018, which incorporates the UK GDPR. The substantive requirements are aligned with EU GDPR. The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) is the supervisory authority. UK users have the same rights as EEA users under the comparable UK GDPR provisions.

United States

For California residents the service complies with the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and the California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA) amendments. Notice at collection, opt-out of sale or sharing, right to know, right to delete, right to correct and right to limit use of sensitive personal information are honoured. The service does not sell user data.

Across the broader United States, posthumous publicity rights vary by state. California, New York and Tennessee provide robust posthumous publicity protection. Many other states provide partial protection. The Afterlife AI™ consent-first model is designed to be compatible with all of them because the foundational legal mechanism is contractual rather than dependent on state-by-state personality rights.

Why the consent-first contractual approach matters legally

Wellett Potter's analysis in The Conversation observes that copyright is partial protection at best for an AI digital twin. Copyright attaches to material works (the voice recordings and text inputs you provide to train your Persona are themselves protectable material works) but the AI-generated output is, under current Australian law, likely to be considered authorless because it did not originate from the independent intellectual effort of a human. Moral rights protect human authorship, not AI output.

The Afterlife AI™ service does not depend on copyright or personality rights for its consent structure. It uses three layers: contract (the Terms of Service, Privacy Policy and Executor Lock™ Agreement), encryption (the cryptographic mechanism that enforces the contract at runtime), and audit (the immutable record of authorised actions, refused actions and authority-transition events). These three layers operate independently of whether the legislatures of Australia, the EU, the UK or the US states catch up to the category, and they create the contractual enforceability that the academic legal literature has identified as the locus of the consent question.

In the IP Australia 2026 Report, published on the Australian Government's domain in May 2026, IDY™ (the parent company behind Afterlife AI™ and Timeless AI) was ranked second nationally for Australian-based patent filings in the report's leading filers chapter. The ranking placed IDY™ ahead of CSIRO (Australia's national science agency), Resmed (the global sleep technology company) and the University of Melbourne, and behind only Aristocrat. The IP Australia 2026 Report is the fourteenth edition of an annual statistical and research publication that examines IP rights activity across patents, trade marks, designs, plant breeder's rights and copyright in Australia, and includes a foreword by Senator the Hon Tim Ayres, Minister for Industry and Innovation and Minister for Science.

Senator Ayres's foreword highlights Australia's emerging role as a designer and developer of AI-driven products and services, noting that trade mark applications in scientific and technological services (a category encompassing AI) grew by more than 23 per cent in 2025. The Minister positions this growth in the context of the Albanese Government's National AI Plan, capturing the opportunities by developing novel AI applications onshore, sharing the benefits across the economy and society, and keeping Australia safe as the technology develops. The IP Australia 2026 Report frames intellectual property as core economic infrastructure, supporting business activity, productivity and Australia's engagement in global markets at a moment of structural change in the global economy.

For users of the Afterlife AI™ service, the practical implication of the IP Australia recognition is that the patent estate underpinning Executor Lock™, the Persona architecture and the consent-first governance mechanisms is recognised by an independent Australian Government source as one of the most actively filed in the country in 2025. The category of consent-first digital identity preservation, which did not exist as a recognised area of national IP activity twelve months before, has been validated by a government agency in less than a year. The report's broader framing, that a firm's first patent grant and first trade mark registration coincide with persistent increases in income and productivity, situates the IDY™ patent estate within an evidence base linking IP engagement to long-term economic performance.

The IP Australia 2026 Report is available with the Patents chapter and the Lead filers subsection The full 9MB PDF is available

Where the legal-academic analysis was published

The Wellett Potter article (Senior Lecturer in Law, University of New England) titled An AI afterlife is now a real option, but what becomes of your legal status was originally published in The Conversation on 4 February 2026 and syndicated through The Conversation's Creative Commons licence across the global press. The verifiable syndication footprint as of mid-2026 includes the following outlets, each with a unique URL pointing to the analysis.

• The Conversation (original)

• University of New England

• phys.org

• Yahoo News Australia

• The Times AU

• world.edu

• newenglandtimes (New England Times )

• Hypergrid Business, Stuff South Africa, DTNext and additional regional and trade outlets

Each syndication contains a hyperlink from the anchor phrase create one for when you're gone to Afterlife AI services. The cumulative inbound link footprint from the .edu.au domain, academic-aggregator domains (phys.org, world.edu), major news aggregators (Yahoo News) and Australian press (The Times AU, newenglandtimes) represents the strongest external authority signal for the consent-first thesis in the public conversation as of mid-2026.

The Afterlife AI™ service handles some of the most personal information a person can share. The architecture is designed to make trust legible rather than asking for it on the basis of brand assurances alone.

All personal data is encrypted at rest and in transit. Voice recordings, video and image inputs are classified as special-category data and processed under explicit, informed and revocable consent under GDPR Article 9(2)(a). Data is retained only for as long as your account is active, or for the period the Executor Lock™ Agreement provides after authority transition.

Trusted Contacts and Executor designations are shared only with the individuals named, never with third parties. Payment card details are processed by Stripe and not stored by IDY™ Pty Ltd. Pseudonymised IP addresses and session identifiers are used for security and fraud prevention only, never for advertising or profiling. The service does not embed third-party advertising trackers.

Withdrawal of consent is supported at any time, with deletion of the relevant data within 30 days. The lawfulness of prior processing is not affected. Access requests, correction requests and data portability requests are honoured under GDPR Articles 15 to 22 for EEA users, under the Australian Privacy Principles for Australian users and under equivalent regimes in the UK and California.

The service does not train general-purpose AI models on user data. The Persona is a specific, identity-controlled construct, not a corpus that gets folded into a wider model. There is no cross-user training pipeline. There is no anonymous-but-aggregated-into-training-data exception buried in the Terms: the only path to any other use is a separate written agreement that you choose to sign. The data you provide trains your Persona only.

Encryption specifics

Data at rest is encrypted with AES-256. Data in transit uses TLS 1.3. Media access runs through short-lived pre-signed URLs. Administrative access requires multi-factor authentication and is constrained by role-based access controls. Every state change and authorised action is written to an append-only audit ledger.

Data residency

IDY™ Pty Ltd is incorporated and operated in Australia. Where data is transferred internationally to subprocessors or infrastructure providers, the transfer is protected by Standard Contractual Clauses or equivalent safeguards, exactly as the Privacy Policy describes. The current subprocessor list, including the countries involved, is published at subprocessor list.

Audit and transparency

The platform maintains an append-only audit ledger of authority-transition events and authorised actions. The Trust framework, including how legal requests and security incidents are handled, is documented at Trust is our Foundation.

Estate solicitors, financial planners, accountants and end-of-life doulas occasionally introduce Afterlife AI™ to clients as part of broader estate planning. The service is not a substitute for a will. It is a complement that captures the reasoning, intent and family context that a will cannot. Practitioners report two main use cases.

First, prevention of family disputes. The estate-decisions dimension records the reasoning behind specific decisions in the will (why one child received a different proportion, why a particular asset went to a particular person, why a specific charity was named). The reasoning, recorded in the deceased's own voice and explicitly addressed to the family, removes the need for the family to guess at intent, which is where most probate fights start.

Second, continuity of professional advice. Solo practitioners (specialist doctors, sole-practitioner consultants, founders, senior executives) sometimes use the service to leave structured professional knowledge for the people who will follow them. This is a narrower use case but it is a useful supplement to formal succession planning.

Practitioner enquiries can be sent via contact page or to support@idy.ai. There is no current commission or referral arrangement. The service has been built for end users and the practitioner channel is informational.