Ten questions I wish someone had asked me

I didn't clone myself.

My team did. They built it as a side project — a bit of fun, a genuine piece of innovation — and they surprised me with it in a meeting. Everyone was pleased. Somebody had made something clever, they'd made it for me, and they wanted to watch me see it.

I laughed.

What else was I going to do? I ran a security company. I'd spent years arguing in public about privacy and people's rights at work. In 2015 I released a tool at Black Hat that scanned for human vulnerabilities, took a lot of fair criticism for it, and helped stand up an ethics and privacy board in response. I had learned that lesson properly.

And then I sat in a room full of people who had built me a gift, and had about four seconds to decide whether to be delighted or to be the person who shut it down.

I chose delighted. I've thought about those four seconds a lot since.

That's where my consent happened. Not beforehand. Not in writing. On the spot, in front of the people who'd built it, weighing what saying no would cost.

Two years later my company was sold. The clone was listed among the assets. Somebody else owns it now.

I'm not telling you this as a cautionary tale about someone careless. I'm telling you because I was about as well-prepared for this as a person can reasonably be, and I still missed it — which suggests the problem isn't carelessness. It's that nobody has written the questions down yet.

So here are mine. They're grouped by when they bite, because that turns out to matter more than how hard.

The question before the questions

Has someone already built one?

The first synthetic likeness in your organisation almost certainly won't arrive through procurement. It'll come from someone capable, with a free weekend and entirely good intentions, who wants to show you what's possible.

Mine did. It was a nice thing to do. It was also the whole problem.

If you wait until you're evaluating vendors to start thinking about this, you're already behind. Go and ask today whether anyone has made one — of you, of your CEO, of a customer's logo and a colleague's voice, as a demo. Ask it as a curious question rather than an investigation, because you want an honest answer, and because the person who did it wasn't breaking any rule that existed at the time.

Before you build it

1. Who is being cloned, and could they have said no without it costing them anything?

I want to be careful here, because the honest answer embarrasses me and not my team. They did something clever and generous and nobody had told them not to.

But I couldn't say no. Not in the sense of being forbidden — I owned the company. In the sense that refusing meant telling a group of people who'd made something impressive, as a present, that they'd crossed a line they had no way of knowing was there. In front of each other. While they waited for my face to do something.

If the founder of a security company can't refuse, be honest about what happens when you put this to someone three levels down whose manager is in the room and visibly enthusiastic.

The test was never whether they said yes. It's what saying no would have cost them.

2. What do they get to see before they agree?

I saw the finished thing. That was the entire experience — no description, no discussion, just my own face on a screen saying words I had never said, with an audience watching my reaction.

There's a real difference between agreeing to an idea and agreeing to an artefact, and I never got offered the first one. Give people the description first and the artefact second, with time in between and nobody watching.

3. What is this face never allowed to say?

I set no boundaries at all. Not one.

In hindsight the list isn't long or difficult — no personal financial requests, nothing involving anyone's family, nothing that would end a career if it leaked. But I never wrote it, so it didn't exist.

4. Where is the source material from, and who else is in it?

Conference recordings, all-hands footage, recorded calls. Check who else is audible in the background, and whether they ever agreed to anything at all.

While you're running it

5. What do the people being tested know, and when?

There's real evidence here rather than just opinion. Research presented at USEC 2025 found that telling people in advance that simulations happen measurably improves how acceptable they find them — and that 64% of people who had been through one were never told anything beforehand.

General notice, specific surprise.

It works, and it's also what NIST SP 800-50r1 recommends for phishing exercises — though that was written before anyone was cloning colleagues.

6. What happens to someone who falls for it?

The same research found that punitive consequences collapse acceptance. An HR conversation costs you far more than a click ever did.

If the answer to this question is anywhere near a performance review, stop and fix that before you go near a synthetic voice.

Afterwards: the part nobody writes down

7. Where does the model live, who can invoke it, and would you know if they had?

I cannot answer this about my own face. Not approximately, not roughly.

That isn't a comfortable sentence to write, and it's the most honest one here.

8. What happens when the cloned person leaves?

Employment ends. The clone doesn't. Whoever authorised it has probably moved on too, so there may be nobody left in the building who knows the thing exists.

9. What happens when the company changes hands?

This is the one I walked into. Not a hypothetical — a line item on an asset register, somewhere between the laptops and the customer list.

During the negotiation I asked my lawyer the obvious question. What do I do if I lose control of this?

The honest answer was that there was very little I could do. So we worked the problem, and what we landed on — genuinely, as a strategy, in a room, with a lawyer — was that my last resort would be to use my own clone to say and do things so far off-brand that nobody would ever want to be associated with it. Poison the asset. Make my own face worthless.

We discussed it. We didn't do it. And afterwards I kept turning it over, because something about it didn't sit right, and it took me a while to work out what.

It isn't a remedy. It was never a remedy.

You can change a password. You can change your clothes, your job, your email address, your phone number. I cannot change my face. I cannot change my voice. There's no version of tainting that copy that doesn't also taint me, because it is me — that's the entire point of it. That strategy amounts to making myself unemployable in order to make a duplicate of me worthless.

That was the best available option. Sit with that for a moment, because it isn't about my situation. It's what protection looks like for anyone in the video.

Every other credential in your organisation can be rotated. This one is issued once, to your employer, permanently.

10. How does someone withdraw, and what does withdrawing actually achieve?

Withdrawal you can't verify is a feeling, not a control. If you cannot describe how deletion would be confirmed, you don't have a withdrawal process yet.

The question underneath it all

Is there a version of this where the answer is no?

If there isn't, the other ten were decorative. There has to be a threshold — an answer you could get that would stop the project and you should know what it is before you start, rather than discovering it under pressure.

Mine, for what it's worth: if the person being cloned can't refuse without consequence, don't create it. Everything else is negotiable.

I've been lucky, and it still isn't over

I should say plainly that I got off lightly.

I lead product and technology at the company that acquired us. I don't control the clone, but I can see it. I know where it is. If someone wanted to use it, there's a fair chance I'd hear about it, because I'm in the room where those conversations happen.

Almost nobody gets that. The ordinary version of this story is that your likeness transfers to an organisation you have never worked for, and you find out what happened to it if you find out at all.

And I should be honest with myself too: visibility isn't control, and tenure isn't permanent. My clone may well outlive my time here as well. It has already outlived one company.

What's next

This has been written from my own experience rather than from a framework, because as far as I can find, no published standard covers consent to be cloned by your own employer. If you're doing this well and I've missed something, I'd like to hear it.

If there is one thing I would like you to remember from this, it’s that a consent form is a document. A clone is a set of keys. You can ask for a document back, keys get copied, and you rarely find out.

Use these questions, invent your own, most of these you can answer in an afternoon with the right three people in a room. Two are properly hard, and one I still can't answer about myself.

If you want to start with the truly hard part first then start with number nine. It's the one nobody asks, it's the one that found me, and it's where you find out that the person in the video has no way back.