Enel Pungas, head of the population operations department at the Ministry of the Interior, explained that publishing the data is important, for example, for institutions with which the deceased had contracts. "All institutions need this information that a person has died," she said.

Historian and name researcher Fred Puss said that in many countries data about deceased persons has been public for decades. According to Puss, the data is also important for historians, and searching for it across different registers has been difficult — especially concerning people who died between 1944 and 1957.

A name researcher can learn from this data, for example, when a particular surname in Estonia died out — meaning when the last bearer of that name passed away.

"Unfortunately, this happens constantly. Forty‑four percent of all Estonian surnames are represented by only one bearer, and when that one bearer dies, the name disappears from Estonia. A large part of those names are not of Estonian origin, but among them are also Estonian names," Puss said.

The Data Protection Inspectorate asked the Ministry of the Interior to assess, before publishing the names, whether making them public could cause discomfort to the relatives of the deceased.

"In the Estonian Personal Data Protection Act there is even a provision that allows certain personal data of deceased persons to be processed without consent, but if such data is processed more broadly as open data, then in fact an additional impact assessment should be carried out," said Geili Keppi, a lawyer at the Data Protection Inspectorate.

Pungas said that as a result of the impact assessment, the data of the deceased will not be published immediately, but seven days after death. The Statistics Office and the Estonian Institute for Health Development have also reviewed the level of detail in death‑cause statistics to ensure that no one can be identified by cause of death.

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