Article: Reverent Retrieval, Not Resurrection: Introducing Consent-Based Digital Legacy Preservation as a Governance Construct for Grief-Safe AI Retrieval

Digital legacy has entered a new and unsettled stage. Families no longer inherit only paper records, photo albums, heirlooms, and estate documents; they inherit dispersed digital traces, cloud archives, messages, social media profiles, recorded voices, passwords, instructions, unfinished conversations, and intimate materials that may outlive the person who created them. At the same time, generative artificial intelligence has made it technically easier to simulate the deceased, generate conversational surrogates, and market the emotional possibility of continued interaction. This paper introduces Consent-Based Digital Legacy Preservation as a design and governance construct for systems that preserve and retrieve legacy materials without impersonating the dead. Its central design principle, Reverent Retrieval, insists that technology may help families recover what was intentionally preserved, but it must not manufacture memory, simulate presence, or convert grief into a persuasive interface. Using a design science-informed conceptual development approach, this paper synthesizes research on digital remains, thanatosensitive design, postmortem privacy, the digital afterlife industry, deathbots, bereavement, and responsible AI governance to construct a bounded model for grief-safe retrieval. The model distinguishes between secure archive infrastructure and family-facing retrieval, then proposes design requirements for consent, permissioned access, archive metadata, source-grounded retrieval, insufficient-information refusal, auditability, dispute handling, and human review. The paper contributes a category-level vocabulary for an under-specified problem space: digital legacy systems that are not merely document vaults, not therapeutic tools, and not AI resurrection products. The argument is simple but urgent: the future of digital legacy should not be measured by how convincingly technology can imitate the dead, but by how carefully it can protect what the living intentionally preserved.