Handling Rights Requests From a Nominee After a Data Principal's Death

Section 14 gives a Data Principal the right to nominate another individual who can exercise their rights under the Act if the Data Principal dies or becomes incapacitated. That nomination mechanism means a rights request from a family member or representative is not automatically out of bounds after the Data Principal's death - it can be entirely legitimate, provided the nomination was properly made and the request falls within its scope.

The practical challenge is that most organizations do not have a nomination on file for most of their customer or user base, since nominating a representative is optional and many people never get around to it. That means every death-related rights request needs a case-by-case check rather than a single standard procedure.

The first step is confirming whether a valid nomination actually exists in your records, and if so, whether the person making the request is the individual named. If no nomination was recorded, you are in different territory - the request may still be handled through other legal channels, such as an executor or legal heir acting under applicable succession law, but that is a different basis than Section 14 and should be evaluated as such.

Ask for proof of death and proof of identity for the person claiming to be the nominee, and treat this verification with the same rigor you would apply to any identity check, since a fraudulent claim to be a nominee is a real risk with sensitive personal data at stake.

A nominee steps into the Data Principal's rights under the Act - access, correction, erasure, and grievance redressal - but that does not automatically mean unrestricted access to everything the deceased person ever did on your platform. Where the nomination itself specified a scope or purpose, honor that scope rather than defaulting to the broadest possible interpretation.

Incapacity cases add another layer: if the Data Principal is alive but incapacitated rather than deceased, consider whether the incapacity is temporary or permanent, and whether the nominee's request is actually necessary given the individual's current situation, since that context can change the appropriate response.

The Rights Navigator can help walk a support team through which right applies and who is entitled to invoke it in less common scenarios like nominee and incapacity requests, which fall outside the standard first-person request flow.