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| Clker.com |
If you teach, there are now at least two versions of you. There’s the one who walks into a classroom, answers email, worries about students and family—and the one who lives on server farms: HR files, benefits accounts, LMS logs, immigration records, social‑media traces, shopping history, phone metadata, and the AI systems quietly stitching it all together into a profile that speaks for you in absentia.
In a digital context, a doppelganger is an algorithmically generated “other self” – a data‑driven double that closely replicates a person’s identity, behavior, or appearance in virtual or computational space. There is also a vaguely mysterious, sometimes “ghostly” aura about the doppelganger, which is not far from how our current data doubles work in large‑scale surveillance systems.
We have reached a point where those two versions—the flesh‑and‑blood you and your data double—are no longer separable. Our “inner” psychological identity and our “outer” digital, institutional identity are fusing into something new. If you teach, advise, or do academic work today, your opportunities, risks, and reputation are increasingly controlled, or at least heavily shaped, by this fused, post‑digital self.
In this post I call that fused, post‑digital identity your FADD—your Fusing Algorithmic Digital Doppelganger.
Three ideas help frame what is happening
1. Data double
Surveillance and digital‑identity researchers talk about your “data double” (sometimes “digital twin” or “digital doppelganger”). This is the dense, constantly updated profile built from your digital traces: payroll and taxes, banking and purchases, LMS activity, travel and device location, social‑media behavior, search history, and more. Institutions use that data doubles to make decisions about you—credit, insurance, hiring, travel, even “trust” or “risk”—usually without you ever seeing the profile itself.
2. Extended self in the digital age
Marketing and consumer‑culture researchers have long written about the “extended self,” the idea that parts of who we are reside outside our bodies—in our possessions, technologies, and archives. In the digital age, that means our phones, cloud storage, feeds, and chat histories have become extensions of memory, agency, and self‑presentation. When your calendar, notes, photos, chats, and documents are all online, erasing them would feel almost like erasing parts of you.
3. Post‑digital identity
Education and media theorists describe a “post‑digital” condition: the digital is no longer a separate realm but the basic fabric of everyday life. In that context, identity is post‑digital from the start; it does not begin offline and then get uploaded later. Our sense of self is formed from the beginning in environments where algorithms, platforms, and dataflows are taken for granted.
Taken together, these ideas point to a fused, post‑digital self and identity: a person whose inner life, social presence, and data double are constantly representing one another and fusing rapidly.
How this fusion shows up in the lives of educators
Your FADD is unusually rich and unusually exposed.
Consider:
- Employment and HR systems. Your contracts, evaluations, sick days, pension contributions, and payroll run through tightly integrated platforms. Those systems often connect to background checks, credit bureaus, and government databases. A small error or a malicious change in one place can cascade into visa problems, benefits denials, or frozen pay.
- Learning management and assessment systems. Your teaching “identity” is increasingly defined by LMS logs: how quickly you grade, how often you post, how “responsive” you appear in the analytics. Students’ complaints, click‑paths, and course completion rates can feed into institutional dashboards that silently rank courses and instructors. You may still think of yourself as “the kind of teacher who…,” but the institution increasingly thinks of you as a pattern in its data.
- Immigration, travel, and cross‑border work. For those who teach on visas, cross borders for conferences, or work in multiple countries, the data double spans states and regimes. Immigration systems, tax authorities, and security agencies link records in ways that are mostly invisible, but very real in their consequences. In some countries, AI‑driven scoring of individuals is already an explicit tool of governance; in others, it is emerging quietly inside “risk‑management” systems.
- Social media and professional reputation. Facebook, X, LinkedIn, and even messaging apps become part of your professional identity, whether you intend them to or not. A single out‑of‑context post or a cloned account using your name and photo can reach administrators, students, and collaborators long before you have a chance to respond. Here your visible extended self and your hidden data double collide: what people see and what algorithms infer bleed into one another. You still experience yourself as “one person,” but in practice, many different copies and versions of you are circulating and being acted upon all the time.
New vulnerabilities
Once you see identity this way, the risks look different.
- Misclassification and scoring. AI systems are increasingly used to infer things about individuals from their data doubles: creditworthiness, employability, “engagement,” even mental‑health risk. These inferences can quietly limit your opportunities, raise your costs, or flag you as a problem—without you ever seeing the label.
- Synthetic impersonation. Deepfakes and other generative tools make it cheap to build a plausible version of you from fragments of your extended self: a cloned voice from a few seconds of audio, a convincing video from public photos, a “you‑sounding” text from your emails or blogposts. Scammers can then use that synthetic you to request money, access systems, or damage your reputation.
- Cascading effects. Because so many systems are linked, a single successful fraud or bureaucratic error can spread. A compromised account may lead to fraudulent loan applications, forged tax returns, benefits theft, or visa violations in your name. From the system’s point of view, it is still “you,” because it is acting on your data double.
- Psychological impact. When reputational hits and administrative decisions are triggered by data you cannot see or control, it is easy to feel both exposed and strangely erased. You are accountable for things done in your name—but you have limited access to how that name is being used.
In other words: the threat surface is no longer just your credit file or inbox. The threat‑vulnerable interface is your fused, post‑digital self—your FADD.
From “privacy” to stewardship of your FADD
So what does it mean to live responsibly and safely as this fused self, especially as an educator? A few shifts in mindset can help:
- From secrecy to selectivity. Old‑style privacy focused on keeping information secret. In a post‑digital environment, some forms of disclosure are simply non‑negotiable if you want to work, teach, travel, or bank. The question becomes: What do I choose to share, with whom, through which channels, and under what conditions? [arxiv](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.12383.pdf)
- From one‑time decisions to ongoing hygiene. Identity protection is no longer a “set‑and‑forget” password choice; it is closer to dental care. Regular checks of your accounts and statements, watching for unfamiliar logins or addresses, updating security settings, and freezing or thawing access to sensitive data when needed all become routine.
- From isolated incidents to systemic patterns. A weird charge on a card used to be “just” fraud. Now it might be the first visible symptom of a broader exploitation of your data double: fake unemployment claims, fraudulent tax refunds, synthetic identities built partly from your records. When something small goes wrong, assume it might connect to a larger pattern.
- From lone vigilance to professional backup. There is a limit to how much a single educator, already overloaded with teaching and life, can monitor and contest on their own. This is where specialized monitoring, restoration, and legal‑support services come in—not just as “credit monitoring,” but as allies in defending your extended, post‑digital identity. [arxiv](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.12383.pdf)
My own bias is that identity‑monitoring and legal‑assistance plans are no longer optional extras for professionals who live so much of their lives online. They offer two things most individuals do not have on their own:
1. Continuous, system‑level visibility into your data double across many databases, and
2. Experts who can help restore and defend your identity when something goes wrong, rather than leaving you to navigate a maze of institutions alone.
An invitation to guard your FADD
If you are reading this as an educator, ESL professional, or academic, you already know that your work identity and personal identity have blurred. Your courses follow you into your living room, your students find you on social media, your HR data is somewhere in the cloud, and your passport and pension are linked to systems you will never see. In that environment, one of the most important things you can do is to start thinking of yourself as more than a single, private “me.”
You are also a data double, an extended self, a post‑digital person—someone whose value and vulnerability are increasingly tied to what lives in databases and models. You cannot opt out of that completely. But you can take it seriously enough to:
- Become more intentional about what you share and where.
- Build regular identity‑hygiene habits into your week.
- Put in place services that watch over your data double and stand beside you if (or when) it is misused.
That is the larger frame within which I now understand tools like IDShield. This is not just about “protecting your credit,” but about protecting your fused, post‑digital self—your FADD—so that the person you know yourself to be, and the person the systems say you are, stay as closely aligned, and as secure, as necessary.
If you would like to explore what that kind of protection could look like in your situation as an educator or former student, feel free to reach out; I am happy to help you think through how best to live with your FADD: wracton@gmail.com or on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/bill-acton)
*Side note: There is already a very different FADD acronym, the so‑called “death gene.” In molecular biology, FADD is a protein with domains that play a key role in tumor growth and destruction. The coincidence of acronyms is a bit eerie—but perhaps not entirely inappropriate. (I might recommend playing Franz Liszt’s solo‑piano transcription of Schubert’s Lied “Der Doppelgänger” as accompaniment!)
Note: This post was drafted with help from an AI assistant, Perplexity.AI, and edited by a very human 82‑year‑old who has no intention of becoming a next victim. (wracton@gmail.com)
