Who Controls the Digital You? Surveillance, AI Profiling, and Synthetic Identity

Conceptual illustration of digital identity showing surveillance, AI profiling, behavioral inference, and synthetic identity fabrication.

Digital systems no longer merely collect information about people. They can observe behavior, infer characteristics, construct persistent profiles, and fabricate new representations attached to recognizable identities. Smart-TV tracking, conversational AI memory, and synthetic nudification reveal a broader ethical problem: who has moral authority over the digital representations through which a person is known?