Tech companies should be banned from creating digital versions of users, influential MP committee chair says
Dame Chi Onwurah's proposal for a new law, the Personal Data (Digital Twins) Bill, would block tech firms from 'twinning' their users without their 'explicit consent'
Social media companies should be stopped from creating digital versions of their users – known as “stealth twinning” – without express permission, a select committee chairwoman has said.
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Dame Chi Onwurah said that while privacy laws such as GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) have rules about gathering and storing personal data, “what that doesn’t deal with is the modelling of your own personality and preferences and likely behaviours”.
Her proposal for a new law, the Personal Data (Digital Twins) Bill, would block tech firms from “twinning” their users without their “explicit consent”.
It would establish the principle that “you have a right to your own self” online.
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Dame Chi, the Commons Science, Innovation and Technology Committee chairwoman, said some social media firms have developed a way of “stealth twinning” their users, creating models of them based on their likes, purchases, interactions and posts without their knowledge.
Data is “being curated and managed, and then fed back” to users “in a way specifically designed to capture your engagement”, she added.
“And then it’s being used to target advertising at you, to drive revenues from you and then, in addition to that, in some cases, it’s being used to groom particularly vulnerable people to extreme behaviours.”
Dame Chi, the Labour MP for Newcastle upon Tyne Central and West, also said: “This is an inflection point or moment.
“And this is the moment to just establish what I think is a principle – it’s there that you shouldn’t be impersonated by other people for their own gain.”
The Bill will be introduced in the House of Commons on Wednesday but will need to attract support from ministers, who set the parliamentary timetable, to become law.
The committee Dame Chi chairs has previously produced a report on social media, misinformation and harmful algorithms.
The panel of MPs found the technology behind For You-style feeds was not “transparent, explainable and accessible to public authorities”.
It also recommended that “users should have more control over the content that is pushed to them online”, including a “‘right to reset’, which would delete all data stored by their recommendation algorithm”.
Ghislaine Boddington, a professor of digital creative industries at the University of Greenwich, told PA that a “lack of transparency” was driving a “lack of trust” in algorithms.
She said digital twins which develop in real-time have the potential to be “so useful and so supportive”, including as a “co-creator” in a similar way to artificial intelligence models such as Claude and ChatGPT.
But, without a right to check and amend personal data as social media users get older, Prof Boddington warned digital twins could start to harm people’s employment prospects or hit insurance bills.
She also warned that even if a social media user gives their consent to set up a digital twin, regulations are yet to address the issue of “stewardship” for “as long as that twin exists”.
She added: “If we don’t own our data, we need to have transparency and trust and the right to revoke issues in our data that we can see are wrong, which might affect our insurance or our work onwards or anything.
“And also accuracy and integrity – how do we avoid misinterpretation?”
Professor Boddington said this question gets “straight into” the conversation about how to regulate privacy, and “scenarios where people can just make a digital twin of you and use it as they want to – and make money off it”.