By: Scott Harris
Why Identity May Become the Most Important Digital Right
Over the last several posts I’ve been working through an idea that’s only starting to enter public conversation: Digital Persona Rights. I’ve written about deepfakes, about the digital footprints quietly piling up behind all of us, about how questions of identity don’t end when a person dies, about AI systems trained on the images, voices, and words of millions of people, and about children inheriting digital identities long before they understand what that means.
Every one of those topics points back to the same question: who owns the rights to a human identity in a digital world?
For most of history, nobody had to ask. Your identity lived mostly in physical space, and it was hard to copy someone’s face, voice, or personality without them in the room. AI is changing that.
From data rights to identity rights
Much of the early fight over digital rights was about data privacy. Over the past twenty years, governments have passed laws to protect certain kinds of personal information, and financial records, medical histories, and ID numbers are now widely treated as sensitive. Those protections matter, but they only cover part of the problem.
AI is getting better and better at analyzing and recreating the things that make up a person: their face, their voice, their gestures and mannerisms, how they write and talk, and how they tend to behave. It doesn’t just process information about people anymore. It can start to replicate people themselves, and that’s a very different challenge than protecting a credit card number or an email address.
Technology is moving faster than policy
Earlier in this series I looked at how this is already happening. Deepfakes can produce realistic images or video of real people. Voice tools can recreate someone’s speech from fairly small samples. Models trained on huge datasets can generate faces that look just like real people. Digital versions of actors have appeared in films after the actors died, and synthetic influencers and AI personalities are popping up all over the internet.
Those are only the early signs. As AI improves, telling a real person from a digital copy will get harder and harder, and yet the laws that govern identity have barely changed.
What today’s laws do and don’t cover
Current law gives only partial answers. Copyright protects creative work like photos, music, and writing. Privacy laws protect certain categories of personal data. Some states recognize publicity rights that let people control commercial use of their name or likeness. None of these were designed for a world where AI can study massive amounts of data and generate synthetic humans.
A photograph can be copyrighted, but a face can’t. A recording can be protected, but a voice isn’t always covered. An online profile may hold personal information, but the personality traits AI can infer from years of your online behavior usually fall outside any legal definition of protected data. So a lot of what makes you you sits in a legal gray area.
Identity as the next digital frontier
Over time, societies have expanded the kinds of rights people hold. Early legal systems focused mostly on property. Later came civil rights, labor protections, and human rights, and in the digital era, new rights around privacy and personal data. I believe AI is pushing us toward the next category: identity rights in digital environments.
Digital Persona Rights would recognize that your likeness, your voice, and your patterns of behavior aren’t just data. They’re part of who you are, and they should be treated that way. That could include protection against:
- unauthorized digital replication
- AI-generated identity manipulation
- training datasets that include identifiable personal likenesses
- loss of control over your digital identity after death
None of this would stop innovation in AI. It would set boundaries around how human identity gets used as these technologies are built and deployed.
Why this matters for everyone
Conversations about AI and identity usually start with celebrities. Actors, musicians, and public figures have the most visible fights over their likeness, their identities carry real commercial value, and they can afford lawyers.
Digital Persona Rights aren’t just a celebrity issue, though. The tools that can replicate identity don’t care whether you’re famous. A deepfake can target anyone with enough of an online footprint, and AI training data can include images and recordings of millions of people who never meant to become part of a machine learning system. As our digital archives grow and AI gets more capable, these risks will land more and more on ordinary people.
Why I see it as a rights issue
When I first started writing about this, some people asked why I’d call it a rights debate instead of just a technology problem. For me it comes down to who the current system protects, and who it leaves out.
Today’s protections for identity are built mostly around money. Publicity rights exist largely to stop someone from profiting off a recognizable name or face, so they work best for people whose identities are already worth something commercially: celebrities, politicians, public figures, and the very wealthy. That’s the first problem, because wealth and political power in this country still lean heavily toward white Americans. The Federal Reserve’s 2022 Survey of Consumer Finances found that the typical white family had about $285,000 in wealth, compared with about $44,900 for the typical Black family and about $61,600 for the typical Hispanic family. Protections tied to wealth will naturally favor the people who have it.
The second problem is that even when protections exist, using them takes a level of legal and political know-how, and access to good lawyers, that’s far more common in some communities than others. A right you can’t realistically enforce doesn’t protect you much.
The third is the technology itself. A 2019 study by the National Institute of Standards and Technology found that many facial recognition algorithms falsely matched Asian and African American faces 10 to 100 times more often than white faces. Those are communities that already face more scrutiny from police. A Stanford-led analysis of nearly 100 million traffic stops found that Black drivers were stopped more often than white drivers, and searched on less evidence. Put biased facial recognition in that environment and it doesn’t fix the problem; it makes it worse. It has already happened. In Detroit, Robert Williams was wrongfully arrested in front of his family after a facial recognition system matched him to someone else.
When the risks of identity misuse fall hardest on the people least able to fight back, protecting identity equally for everyone stops being a technical question. It’s a question of rights.
The beginning of a new debate
Every major technological shift eventually forces us to rethink the boundaries of individual rights. The industrial revolution reshaped labor rights. The civil rights movement reshaped social equality. The internet forced new questions about privacy and data. AI may be the next turning point. If machines can replicate parts of a human identity, we have to decide whether that identity is a resource anyone can use, or something each person has the right to control.
Defining the future of digital identity
There’s no universally accepted legal definition of Digital Persona Rights yet, but the questions driving the conversation are getting harder to ignore. Who owns the rights to a digital identity? Who decides whether your likeness can be recreated by AI? Who controls it after you die? And how should any of that apply to the billions of ordinary people whose images, voices, and data are already online?
How we answer may shape one of the most important legal and ethical debates of the AI era. Because as AI keeps evolving, the question may not be what machines can do anymore. It may be what machines should be allowed to do with us.
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