Princeton undergraduates are helping the organization develop standards for post-mortem digital privacy and death in custody.
The Clinic represents an increasing student interest in international affairs and human rights research, particularly in an age where digital privacy is a focal point.(Rachel Brooks)
Princeton University undergraduate Sophie Miller stood with four peers in a conference room in Geneva, Switzerland. Across from her were her professor Udi Ofer; the United Nations special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions; and staff members of the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.
Although it was June 29, she wasn’t on a summer internship. Nor was she an observer. Miller and her peers were co-presenting research from the Princeton Policy Advocacy Clinic—the first US initiative to offer undergraduates a policymaking experience modeled after law-school clinics. Founded in 2022 by Ofer, the year-long clinic, housed in the School for Public and International Affairs, enables juniors to do hands-on policy work while helping shape both domestic and international guidelines.
“I wanted to create something that I felt didn’t exist right now in higher education,” said Ofer, director of the clinic and the John L. Weinberg/Goldman Sachs and Co. Visiting Professor and Lecturer of Public and International Affairs at Princeton. “This is not a simulation. Students don’t write hypothetical memos,” he added. “They work directly with institutions such as the United Nations, and the work that they produce is used in the real world.”
The 2026 program opted to support Geneva-based policy on death in custody and post-mortem digital privacy. Miller’s spring semester group project amounted to a 442-page, 3,985-footnote report on rising prison mortality and the digital remains that a person leaves behind on e-platforms when they die. Those platforms range from banking to social media.
The Clinic represents an increasing student interest in international affairs and human rights research, particularly in an age where digital privacy is a focal point. Miller described her work examining policies in all 50 states, six US territories, and three federal agencies as “unlike anything else” in her Princeton career. Her group’s findings raise new concerns about autonomy and data rights amid the current AI boom.
Morris Tidball-Binz, the UN’s special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, said the Clinic’s work is “a translation of issues and problems” in the West that he can use as a “litmus paper to measure similar problems elsewhere.”
“You may start just guessing what might be happening with the death penalty in Saudi Arabia or in China or in Iran,“ he added, “where what happens behind walls is far more difficult to document and grasp, but the underlying and essential problems are the same worldwide.”
According to Ofer, the work aims to cut across ideology so its projects remain free from partisan agendas. It curates partnerships that provide meaningful outcomes while upholding the academic independence of the university, he said.
The full-year timeline is divided into a fall semester, balancing seminar-learning with practical skills, and a spring semester devoted to active policy campaigns. Fall exercises such power-mapping and campaign advocacy strategy are seldom taught to law students, let alone undergraduates.
About half of the spring projects have involved the UN, but Clinic participants have also worked on issues before Congress and state governments in Louisiana, New Jersey, and New York. Past topics span criminal justice reform, unconditional cash transfers for postpartum mothers, police use of force, and crack-to-powder cocaine sentencing disparities.
“The assignment was not to reach a predetermined conclusion about American policing or to assume that international institutions are always correct,” Ofer said. “It was to understand the UN standards, examine policies in every jurisdiction as objectively and consistently as possible, identify both strengths and shortcomings, and provide policymakers and UN experts with evidence they can evaluate for themselves,” he said.
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Students in the Clinic have found meaning in conducting professional-level research for clientele—translating data into recommendations used outside the classroom. In turn the agency has found great utility in the work of the students. The Clinic has been “extremely valuable” in offsetting the workload of granular country-level analyses, limited by capacity, said Yasmine Ashraf, a human rights officer who works for the Thematic and Special Procedures Division.
For Sophia Zuo, a senior and international student on a pre-law track, the UN project combines her academic, personal, and professional lives. Being from Taiwan, she noted how US action reverberates and inspires norms of treatment abroad.
“The larger implications were totally eclipsing the US,” Zuo said. “Nations are inherently competitive or contextual, where standards for governance of respecting citizens are based on a universal conception,” added Zuo, who called the Clinic the “most tangible” of her courses.
Alongside Miller, Zuo was responsible for a memo on disrespect for personhood and religious practices related to final disposition and autopsy. Their research found that 81 percent of jurisdictions do not explicitly recognize the deceased’s wishes for disposition, like cremation, and less than half consider religion in procedures like family notification and burial. Further, almost a quarter of jurisdictions permit unclaimed incarcerated bodies to be used for scientific research without consent.
Beyond the violation of human rights in physical detention facilities, their report emphasized the lack of dignity in the digital realm, an under-researched topic worldwide. Most users do not have pre-mortem control over their post-mortem privacy. In 48 states and one territory, the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act governs the management of a person’s digital property and identity after death (Delaware and Massachusetts haven’t enacted it). It uses a three-tiered priority system to determine who controls a deceased person’s accounts.
Yet the report concluded that current US law fails to protect the dead online, often ceding control over digital remains to private platforms. Because legacy online tools and digital estate planning are rare, company terms become the de facto rules for digital lives, furthering exploitation after death.
Senior Kyler Zhou applied his background in US and European privacy laws to investigate five domains: social networking services, short message services (SMS), e-mail, cloud storage, and Al chatbots. The results were alarming, Zhou said: Of 50 platforms evaluated, 75 percent provide users no meaningful pre-mortem control over digital remains, 44 percent make no reference to digital remains in their policies, and only a quarter have a legacy online tool.
Key questions in the research addressed family members’ rights to delete or deactivate a deceased person’s account, deletion upon inactivity, and abuse controls. For example, Google operates a robust system called the Inactive Account Manager. Users can choose contacts to receive part or all of their data or delete their account upon a specified period of inactivity. Similarly, Facebook stands out for letting fiduciaries memorialize an account. This option locks it, prevents security breaches, and turns the page into a memorial where people can pay tributes to the deceased. But top platforms like Reddit, WhatsApp, Signal, and GroupMe offer no bespoke policies governing post-mortem rights, Zhou explained. TikTok has a memorialization feature, but it’s unclear what happens to the data.
Most concerning were AI chatbots and the level of control that companies retain over chat logs. The capabilities of AI are expanding, with little to no government oversight. Large language model–powered chatbots can take personal information and reconstruct the identity of an individual after death, the Clinic’s report discusses. When an Al model ingests sensitive information during training, the data might also be memorized by the model, regurgitated, and exposed. AI services such as OpenAI, Claude, Perplexity, and DeepSeek maintain opaque or inconsistent privacy policies at best.
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As digital footprints grow, establishing guidelines for both physical and online remains is urgent to respect the memory and wishes of the dead—such as prohibiting unauthorized AI training on the identities of the deceased.
Other schools have launched or expressed interest in starting similar initiatives. The Cornell State Policy Advocacy Clinic was modeled after Ofer’s program in 2023, but its focus is New York advocacy. More schools can supplement traditional curriculums with experiential learning and clinical education, giving students responsibility for complicated policy tasks that identify gaps, notify policymakers, and affect real legal standards for all nations. “Human rights principles do not implement themselves,” Ofer said.
In the Geneva conference room, the five students finished their presentation after an hour and a half. “That made me emotional,” Tidball-Binz recalled. “Razor sharp, very concise,” he told me, “both from the brain and the heart, in full synchronicity.”
Rachel BrooksRachel Brooks is a student at Princeton University and a freelance journalist.