Why protecting personality starts with consent
I write this as someone who has spent years arguing that control over personal data must move from corporate contracts back to the individual. The rise of generative AI and instant sharing has turned persona into both a business asset and a risk vector. When a voice, likeness or mannerism can be cloned in minutes, protecting personality without explicit consent is no longer a niche legal question — it is a governance and economic priority for firms and regulators alike.
The problem in data and dollars
Recent reporting shows the scale and speed of harm. AI-driven impersonations have been used to instruct employees to transfer funds and to create fabricated executive videos that influence markets — incidents that caused multi‑million dollar losses in corporate contexts and spooked exchanges and investors.The Persona is Personal These are not celebrity problems alone: leadership voices, signatures and informal gestures are increasingly part of a company’s intangible asset base and, at the same time, its attack surface.
Data points to consider:
- Deepfakes and voice-cloning materially reduce the cost of impersonation and widen reach almost instantly.
- Time-to-truth (the lag between a fake’s spread and an authoritative rebuttal) is typically measured in hours while the fake spreads in minutes.
- Boards and CFOs increasingly list persona-related incidents in operational‑risk registers after real losses and market disruptions.
Policy implications: consent as a statutory principle
If personality carries economic value, then consent must be a statutory gatekeeper. Legislation that enshrines consent for the commercial use, replication or training of models on a person’s identifiable attributes would:
- Make unauthorised commercial use an actionable violation with swift relief mechanisms.
- Require platforms and AI developers to maintain provenance and consent metadata for training datasets.
- Align data-protection regimes with publicity and privacy interests so citizens — not only celebrities — can assert control.
India’s recent debates around the Digital Personal Data Protection framework — and my own suggestions for a central dashboard for data principals — point the way to operationalising consent at scale (see my earlier notes on consent forms and dashboards for data owners).Consent Forms for Personal Data Dashboard for Data Owners
Business impact and board priorities
Boards, risk committees and investors should treat persona-management like trademark or code protection. Practical business implications include:
- Valuation: leadership persona now contributes to brand equity and should be considered in intangible-asset reporting and due diligence.
- Counterparty risk: spoofed approvals or fake executive communications can create settlement and compliance failures.
- Insurance and contracts: directors’ and cyber insurance products must evolve to cover persona-driven losses; vendor contracts must forbid training on identifiable persona data without documented consent.
Ignoring these risks creates hidden liabilities that can erode shareholder value faster than many product failures.
Actionable recommendations — for corporations
- Map Persona Surface Area (PSA)
- Inventory where leadership and identifiable attributes appear: earnings calls, videos, podcasts, short‑form clips, internal comms and marketing assets.
- Define Time-to-Truth (TTT)
- Establish an SLA measured in minutes for verified rebuttals and public notices; test it in drills.
- Contractual guardrails
- Add anti-cloning and training prohibitions into vendor, agency and licensing agreements; require rights to raw recordings and takedown cooperation.
- Technical provenance and verification
- Embed cryptographic signatures, time-stamps and watermarks in official media; publish an authoritative verification channel for investors, partners and employees.
- Monitoring and rapid response
- Invest in continuous monitoring across platforms, a legal rapid-response retainer, and a public-communications protocol mapped to disclosure channels.
- Persona-incident drills
- Run cross-functional simulations (legal, IR, security, HR) that assume rapid synthetic impersonation and measure decision lag.
Actionable recommendations — for policymakers
- Make explicit consent the threshold for commercial use of identifiable attributes, including training data for AI models.
- Require platforms and model providers to retain consent metadata and publish transparent provenance for datasets used in public-facing models.
- Mandate expedited takedown and injunctive mechanisms for persona misuse, with proportionate penalties for non‑cooperation.
- Provide low-cost legal remedies (fast-track injunctions) so ordinary citizens can seek relief without prohibitive costs.
- Encourage standards bodies and industry consortia to define technical norms for watermarking and verification to reduce time-to-truth.
Why this matters to leaders and founders
Most startups obsess about product-market fit; fewer prepare for persona-market misuse. Yet a single impersonation incident can cause immediate financial loss, regulatory scrutiny and long-lasting reputational harm. Investing in consent infrastructure — contracts, technical provenance, monitoring and policy engagement — is an insurance premium that pays off the first time it prevents a wrong transfer, a market panic or a false endorsement.
I have argued before that consent needs practical mechanisms: standardised forms, a user dashboard and a consent manager are not theoretical luxuries but building blocks for enforceable autonomy.Consent Forms for Personal Data Dashboard for Data Owners
Conclusion
Protecting personality by enforcing consent is both a rights issue and an economic imperative. Boards, regulators and technology providers must converge on a simple principle: no commercial use, cloning or training on a person’s identifiable attributes without documented consent. That is how we preserve dignity, reduce market risk, and make our digital economy more resilient.
Regards,
Hemen Parekh
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