Chi Onwurah MP: ‘My bill will ban tech companies from turning you into an algorithm’

In today’s tech driven world, it is almost impossible to be offline. According to Ofcom, the average UK adult now spends around a quarter of their waking life on the internet and last year one third of all retail sales were online. But this time spent online has allowed tech companies to undertake a stealth-twinning of individuals meaning you can be exploited, groomed, targeted and mis-sold – by a digital version of yourself.

Tech platforms including X, Facebook and Amazon have a model of you, based on hundreds or thousands or millions of data points they hold on you: what you purchase, content you engage with, streaming preferences. These inputs are collated to create “digital twins” which are then used to predict your behaviour, to target advertising and, in some cases, to groom extreme behaviours in ways outside of your control.

The ability to model human likeness and personalities represents a fundamental shift in power from us as individuals to large American and Chinese tech companies. If the state had been holding huge files on everything we had done online, we would rightly be outraged and the fact that this is being done by a small number of big, foreign companies, only makes it more outrageous.

Some may be asking what the need to tackle this now – I know Meta has collected data on me since I joined Facebook in 2005. But back then the content they fed you was based on your expressed preferences, friends you had chosen or people you followed. That is not the case now.

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As part of my committee’s inquiry into social media and algorithms, we heard from witnesses how content data is being curated, not just stored. Through this curation, posts are being fed back to you to drive your engagement, generally to drive revenue but in some cases, to groom particularly vulnerable people to extract certain behaviours.

The impact on children is of particular concern, given their potential exposure to this technology literally from the cradle – an AI camera pointed at them in a cot, a ‘smart toy’ on their pillow, smart phones in their hands. Imagine someone was following your child with a clipboard and made a note of everything they did. That is how these digital twins are being created – what they ate for dinner, how they sat, what they watched on TV or books they read before bed.

My committee also heard awful examples of the potential for algorithmic grooming. A fourteen-year-old girl was engaging with content online about weight and weight issues; the algorithm drove weight-loss and ultimately self-harm content at that child.

With AI we are now at an inflection point in automated personality capture and must establish the principle that you have a right to your personality and likeness in the AI age.

That is why I will be introducing a bill that would make creating a digital twin to simulate human appearance and cognitive performance illegal without the express consent of the individual. This builds on legislation in the United States, Europe and China to protect personhood and reflects concerns over copyright and deepfakes.

No one has the right to impersonate you for gain; impersonating human likeness to reap revenues or achieve social and political goals should not be legal. This bill will establish the principle that there is only one me, for everyone.