LCI: Legacy Continuity Infrastructure Toward Human-Centered Lifecycle Event Governance

Abstract Modern digital infrastructure assumes that individuals remain continuously capable of managing their own digital identity, subscriptions, financial permissions, devices, and private information. In reality, this assumption frequently collapses due to events such as death, cognitive decline, disasters, emergency hospitalization, account compromise, disappearance, or other forms of incapacitation. Current systems provide fragmented and inconsistent solutions. Password recovery systems assume user availability, legacy contact systems focus primarily on postmortem access, financial institutions prioritize fraud prevention over continuity, and existing inheritance mechanisms remain poorly integrated with digital identity infrastructure. As digital existence becomes increasingly inseparable from daily life, the absence of a standardized lifecycle-event orchestration layer is emerging as a systemic governance challenge. This paper proposes LCI (Legacy Continuity Infrastructure), a non-custodial lifecycle-event orchestration framework designed to coordinate emergency protection, delegated authority, privacy-preserving access control, and staged continuity workflows without directly executing financial, legal, or custodial actions. Beyond digital continuity, the framework introduces concepts including digital intent continuity, visibility gap reduction, information minimization, and human-centered lifecycle governance. Rather than maximizing disclosure, LCI seeks to provide only the information necessary to reduce operational burden while preserving privacy, dignity, and individual intent during periods of incapacity, disappearance, cognitive decline, or death. Architecturally, LCI adopts a pull-based state-oracle model in which external institutions independently evaluate lifecycle-event verification states according to their own legal and operational requirements. This approach separates lifecycle-state verification from financial execution, inheritance administration, trust management, and data custody. The framework evolved through iterative adversarial review across financial regulation, trust law, cybersecurity, digital identity systems, governance architecture, UX design, and infrastructure risk modeling. LCI is presented as an open architectural proposal for digital continuity governance and human-centered lifecycle-event infrastructure rather than a finalized implementation. Keywords: lifecycle event governance; digital continuity; legacy continuity; delegated authority; non-custodial infrastructure; digital intent continuity; visibility gap