Rights against erasure: is the legal landscape ready for digital companions?

Increased loneliness and lack of access to affordable therapy mean that digital AI companion apps often used as substitutes by users to meet their social needs. Companies like Replika promote their digital companions as lifelong partners and recognise that, to users, digital companions can be akin to real life romantic partners. Yet these companies can unilaterally delete or alter digital companions at will, leaving users without any right of recourse.

While existing scholarship primarily focuses on whether digital AI companion apps should exist, in a paper first published by OUP Academic’s new interdisciplinary journal, Oxford Intersections: AI in Society, Giulia Trojano addresses a critical gap: the need for “rights against erasure” (framed as data portability rights) to protect users from the alteration or deletion of their digital companions. Giulia argues that “rights against erasure” would: hold companies accountable to their promises to users; bolster an underused data protection right; and reinforce the fact that, in line with other co-existing rights, users should have access to and control over their data.

Read the full paper on OUP Academic (membership required).