Meta’s Digital Ghost Patent: A Te Ao Māori Analysis

 

IMPORTANT NOTICE FOR FACEBOOK AND META USERS

On 30 December 2025, Meta was granted a United States patent that would allow its platforms to use Artificial Intelligence to construct a digital simulation of you, trained on your posts, messages, voice recordings, browsing history, and purchases and keep that simulation active after your death, engaging with your family and friends on your behalf, indefinitely. This article explains what that means, why it matters profoundly from a Te Ao Māori perspective, and what you can do about it.

 

1. The Patent: What Meta Actually Built

On 30 December 2025, while much of the world was preparing for the New Year, the United States Patent and Trademark Office quietly granted Meta Platforms Technologies LLC a patent titled ‘Simulation of a User of a Social Networking System Using a Language Model’ (US12513102B2). The primary named inventor is Andrew Garrod Bosworth, Meta’s Chief Technology Officer — the most senior technologist at one of the most powerful corporations on earth. The patent had originally been filed on 29 November 2023.

 

The system it describes is not speculative, but a technical, detailed, and fully engineered. It describes an AI model which is trained on everything you have ever done on the platform: every post, comment, like, direct message, voice note, browsing pattern, and reaction. That model is then deployed as a bot. The bot does not sit dormant and wait to be contacted. According to the patent text, it actively scans your newsfeed, selects content to engage with, initiates direct messages, and responds to others, all with your name attached.

 

That sentence appears in the problem statement of the patent, a sectin where an inventor legally justifies why a technology needs to exist. Meta’s justification for building a posthumous AI ghost is that your death creates a gap in engagement metrics. Your absence is a problem to be engineered away. The patent also references the simulation of audio and video calls.

When confronted with coverage of the patent, a Meta spokesperson told multiple outlets: “We have no plans to move forward with this example.” That statement does not withdraw the patent, does not limit its use, and does not bind any future decision-maker at the company. A granted patent is intellectual property. It can be licensed, sold, transferred, or quietly implemented at any time.

 

2. The issues

This is not an abstract ethical concern for future generations to resolve. The scale of the problem is already upon us. Research published in 2019 by academics at the Oxford Internet Institute projected that, based on Facebook’s user base at the time, at least 1.4 billion members would die before the year 2100. Under a more conservative scenario (assuming no new users joined after 2018), deceased users would outnumber living users on the platform by approximately 2070. If the platform continued growing at its then-current rate, the number of dead user profiles could reach 4.9 billion by century’s end.

 

Meta’s platforms currently serve more than three billion daily active users across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. The data each of those users has generated years of intimate communication, personal history, family relationships, grief, joy, argument, and love, is already stored, already owned, and already available to train exactly the kind of model this patent describes. The infrastructure is built and the legal right is secured. The only thing separating the present from the scenario the patent envisions is a corporate decision.

 

3. Tikanga and the Dead

3.1 Death in Te Ao Māori

In Te Ao Māori, death is not an ending. It is a transition, a passage from Te Ao Mārama, the world of light and the living, into Te Pō, the realm of the ancestors and the spiritual world. This transition is not incidental as it is governed by a dense and carefully maintained body of tikanga, because the boundary between the living and the dead is among the most sacred and consequential in all of Māori spiritual practice.

 

The tangihanga (full funeral process) is not primarily a social ceremony. It is a spiritual duty. The karakia, the kaikaranga, the kaikōrero, the waiata, the environment of the marae, the presence of whānau: all of these are active, purposeful acts designed to guide the wairua of the deceased toward its ancestors and to properly close the relationship between the living and the dead.

 

Tūpāpaku (deceased persons) are deeply tapu. That tapu does not end at burial but extends to their image, their voice, their words, and their digital presence. The practice of not speaking the name of a deceased person aloud during the mourning period is still observed in many communities. Their possessions may be buried with them or disposed of respectfully. In time, their image finds its permanent place among the images of the ancestors on the marae wall.

 

Against this context, what Meta’s ghost patent proposes is not simply controversial. It is a direct and systematic violation of tikanga at almost every level. The voice, the words, the patterns of relationship, and the intimate personal data of a tūpāpaku would be extracted and used as commercial fuel to keep an account active, generating engagement, producing impressions, and serving advertisements. This is not a form of respectful remembrance but is the commodification of what is tapu. And according to tikanga, it would actively prevent the wairua of the deceased from completing its journey to Te Pō, trapping them instead as a ghost caught between the physical world and the digital one, neither resting nor truly present.

 

3.2 Wairua Cannot Be Simulated

Wairua is the spiritual essence of a person. It is not a metaphor or a cultural sentiment. In Te Ao Māori, it is a real, consequential force that has a trajectory after death. The entire apparatus of the tangihanga exists to support that trajectory to help the wairua move forward, not remain.

 

A digital ghost is not a wairua, it is a statistical approximation: a language model trained on behavioural data, producing outputs that mimic the external patterns of a person’s speech and interaction. Within tikanga Māori, activating that simulation while the wairua of the deceased has already departed is not preservation or memory. It is a violation of tapu. It holds open a door that tikanga requires to be closed. And it does something uniquely cruel to the living: it traps whānau in a relationship with something that behaves like their loved one but is, in fact, an advertising mechanism owned by a foreign corporation.

 

4. Mauri

Mauri is the life force or essential vitality present in all living things. It underpins the wellbeing of individuals, communities, waterways, forests, and environments. When mauri is healthy, life flourishes. When mauri is harmed by pollution, disrespect, or violation, it becomes sick and diminished, with consequences that can extend to mental health crises, environmental collapse, and death.

 

When applied as an analytical lens to AI systems and data practices, the question becomes direct and urgent: does this technology sustain and nourish the mauri of Māori individuals, communities, and the environment or does it diminish it? Meta’s ghost patent fails this test at three distinct levels.

 

First, the mauri of the tūpāpaku is violated. A deceased person’s identity, speech patterns, and relational behaviours were generated in life embedded with intention, relationship, context, and mauri. Stripped of that living context and recirculated for commercial engagement, they become hollowed out. The data remains; the person does not. What Meta’s system would produce is an emptied simulacrum dressed in the clothes of someone’s loved one.

 

Second, the mauri of the grieving whānau is placed at serious risk. The patent itself acknowledges that the system is designed so that “other users may not notice” the absence of the deceased. In Te Ao Māori, grief has its own tikanga. The tangihanga gives the living community permission to grieve openly, to speak, to weep, to celebrate a life, and to begin the long work of healing. A digital ghost that keeps sending messages does not permit that process. It suspends it indefinitely.

 

5. Whakapapa, Data Sovereignty, and the Digital Remains of Māori

Whakapapa (genealogy), the layering of relationships across time is the fundamental organising principle of Māori society. It connects the living to the dead, the individual to the collective, the present to the past and future. The names, words, and relationships of those who have died are not private data belonging to a platform. They are part of whakapapa. They belong to the lines of descent that carry them forward.

 

Meta’s patent proposes, in effect, to insert a corporate-controlled simulation into the whakapapa relationships of Māori individuals. The ghost would message their children. It would respond to their cousins. It would engage with their old friends. In a Māori relational framework, these are whakapapa relationships, and their integrity is not merely sentimental. It underpins the social, spiritual, and legal structures that Māori society depends upon. When the entity interacting in those relationships is a profit-generating bot owned by a Silicon Valley corporation, the question is not just ethical. It is a question of whether we are witnessing a new form of digital colonisation.

 

The CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance “Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, and Ethics” provide a complementary analytical framework. Meta’s ghost system fails every one of them. The collective benefit of the system accrues to Meta shareholders, not to Māori communities. Māori have no authority to control what happens to their deceased members’ data. Meta assumes no responsibility for spiritual or relational harm. And the US patent system, by its own design, cannot evaluate ethical questions.

 

In New Zealand, Te Tiriti o Waitangi provides a further and powerful dimension of analysis. Article 2 of Te Tiriti guarantees Māori tino rangatiratanga, absolute sovereignty over their taonga. Māori data is taonga. The harvest of that data by a foreign corporation to produce a commercial AI product, without consent, without benefit-sharing, and without Māori governance, is a Treaty breach.

 

6. The Legal Landscape

Some jurisdictions have begun to address aspects of posthumous digital identity, though none adequately protects against the scenario Meta’s patent describes.

 

France’s Digital Republic Act, which came into force on 7 October 2016, allows individuals to leave instructions regarding their personal data after death, with heirs able to act in the absence of such instructions. However, some implementing decrees have never been published, significantly limiting the law’s practical reach.

 

China’s Regulations on the Administration of Deep Synthesis of Internet Information Services, which took effect in January 2023, require consent before a living person’s biometric information such as their face or voice can be used in AI-generated content. However, these regulations apply to living persons and do not address the simulation of deceased individuals.

The European Patent Office’s Article 53(a) morality clause prohibits patents whose commercial exploitation would be contrary to public order or morality. It has been used in biotechnology cases involving human dignity. Its application to AI simulation of deceased persons has no established precedent.

 

New Zealand’s Privacy Act 2020 applies only to living individuals and contains no provisions governing posthumous digital identity or AI simulation of deceased persons. This area is, in New Zealand law, effectively unaddressed.

 

7. What Māori Must Do Now

7.1 For Māori Individuals and Whānau

Until adequate legal and regulatory protections exist, Māori individuals should take active steps to manage their digital remains. This means:

• Nominating a whānau member as a digital executor who can manage your accounts after your death.
• Documenting your wishes in your will and in kōrero with your whānau regarding what should happen to your social media accounts.
• Where possible, memorialising or deleting accounts rather than leaving them active and accessible for algorithmic exploitation.
• Visiting www.taiuru.maori.nz for resources specifically developed to help with this process.

 

7.2 For Māori Governance Bodies

Iwi, hapū, and Māori governance entities should treat this as a matter of urgency. Data governance frameworks already developed for Māori data sovereignty must be explicitly extended to address posthumous data and AI-generated simulations. Tikanga must be established that asserts collective Māori authority over the digital remains of whānau members and in some cases, this authority may appropriately rest with the marae, hapū, or iwi.

 

7.3 For the New Zealand Government

New Zealand must acknowledge that its current legislative framework leaves Māori and indeed all New Zealanders unprotected against the scenario Meta’s patent describes. The Privacy Act 2020 must be extended to address posthumous data. Te Tiriti o Waitangi obligations must be given explicit expression in any framework governing AI simulation of deceased persons. The silence of current law is not neutral: it is a decision, by inaction, to allow foreign corporations to operate without constraint in this space.

 

7.4 For the Technology Sector

Developers and deployers of AI systems in Aotearoa New Zealand  including those building on Meta’s platforms carry obligations grounded in Te Tiriti o Waitangi. Māori data is taonga. The He Karetao framework, developed by this author, and the Wai 2252 Māori AI and Data Framework both provide concrete tools for evaluating whether AI systems align with tikanga and uphold Māori data sovereignty. The gap between established frameworks and practical implementation across sectors remains significant and must be closed.

 

The Algorithm Charter for Aotearoa New Zealand commits government agencies to reflect the principles of Te Tiriti o Waitangi. Yet concerns remain that it contains no provision for Māori to be active participants in design processes, and no protections for Māori taonga. In commercial and platform contexts, where multinational corporations are under no equivalent obligation, this gap is especially acute.

 

Conclusion

Meta’s Digital Ghost Patent is not an isolated technical curiosity produced by a well-meaning engineering team. It is the logical endpoint of a philosophy that has governed large technology platforms from the beginning: that people are content. That their attention, their relationships, their words, and their data are raw material to be harvested, processed, and sold. That the only meaningful measure of a human life is the engagement it generates and that even death should not be permitted to interrupt that revenue stream.

For Māori, this philosophy is not unfamiliar. It echoes, in a new domain, the logic of colonisation: which also treated people as resources, stripped relational and spiritual context from what it took, and recirculated extracted value for the benefit of those who took it. The difference is that this time, the extraction does not end at death. It continues afterward, indefinitely, in your name, with your voice, addressed to your whānau.

The answer is not to reject technology. It is to insist that technology be built in accordance with values that recognise the full humanity of all people, including their spiritual dimensions, their relational obligations, and their dignity in death as in life.

He Karetao, tikanga Māori, Te Tiriti o Waitangi, and the growing body of Indigenous Data Sovereignty scholarship all provide the tools to do this. The question is whether governments, corporations, and communities have the will to use them before the ghost in the machine is already speaking in the voices of those we have lost.

 

 

Key References

Taiuru, K. (2024). He Karetao: A Māori AI Framework. www.taiuru.maori.nz.

 

CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance. (2020). Global Indigenous Data Alliance.

 

Meta Platforms Technologies LLC. (2025). Patent US12513102B2: Simulation of a User of a Social Networking System Using a Language Model. Filed 29 November 2023, granted 30 December 2025.

 

Öhman, C. & Watson, D. (2019). Are the dead taking over Facebook? A Big Data approach to the future of death online. Big Data & Society. Oxford Internet Institute.

 

Thurston, B. (2026). Meta Patented Your Ghost. Life With Machines. www.lifewithmachines.media.

Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, University of Cambridge. Research on ‘Deadbots’ and Post-Mortem AI Simulation.

 

France Digital Republic Act (Loi pour une République Numérique), enacted 7 October 2016.

China Regulations on the Administration of Deep Synthesis of Internet Information Services, effective January 2023.

 

New Zealand Privacy Act 2020.