Legal and Social Dimensions of Surviving Spouses' Digital Property Rights After a Partner's Death: A Doctrinal, Comparative, and Socio-Legal Study

Abstract

The increasing digitisation of personal, financial, and social life has created a new category of assets that survive their owners. In many jurisdictions, and especially in India, widows often become the first persons responsible for managing a deceased spouse's digital estate, including mobile devices, email accounts, cloud storage, social media profiles, online banking interfaces, cryptocurrency wallets, and monetised digital platforms. However,Indian succession law lacks a comprehensive framework for posthumous access to such assets, leaving surviving spouses to navigate a patchwork of succession statutes, data-protection rules, criminal-liability provisions, and private platform contracts. This article introduces the concept of digital widowhood and examines the legal, technological, and socio-cultural barriers surviving spouses face in accessing and administering a deceased partner's digital assets. It reviews the existing global and Indian scholarship on digital succession and post-mortem privacy, identifies a specific gap at the intersection of gendered widowhood and digital inheritance that has not previously been named or analysed, and sets out the doctrinal, socio-legal, comparative, and empirical methodology used to test three doctrinal hypotheses and four linked empirical hypotheses regarding the adequacy of the current legal position. The doctrinal analysis examines the Indian Succession Act, 1925; the Hindu Succession Act, 1956; the Information Technology Act, 2000; and the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, as well as platform terms of service and emerging judicial developments on informational privacy and personality rights. The comparative analysis draws on statutory and judicial models from the United States, the European Union, Germany, and France to identify adaptable principles of fiduciary access, classification, and consent. The paper argues that the current Indian framework produces economic insecurity, privacy conflicts, and procedural uncertainty for surviving spouses, and that this burden falls disproportionately on them. Disproportionately affects widows because of documented patterns of unequal digital and financial participation within Indian marriages. It proposes a gender -sensitive, classification-based model of digital estate administration that distinguishes economic, relational, and personal digital assets, together with a specified survey-based empirical research design capable of testing the model's underlying socio-legal claims among widows across multiple personal-law regimes. The analysis and proposed framework are intended to be of comparative interest beyond a single jurisdiction, wherever succession law has yet to catch up with the realities of a digitised estate.