Automating Trustworthiness in Digital Twins

Digital twins are virtual models of cities that are built on real-time data extracted from sensors located within our built environment. Digital twins funnel a wide range of collected data from urban environments into automated decision-making frameworks that govern how we plan, design, build, operate and manage smart cites, including occupants. However, this use of collected data to predict and shape future behaviour in the city is accompanied with limited transparency about how automated decisions are made. Digital twins can consequently lead to ‘black box cities’ where data extraction seamlessly results in an automated decision-making output. This chapter examines whether the data collection practices that underpin digital twins are dataveillant and considers how information privacy legal obligations, articulated in the design of digital twins, may affect occupant perception of how trustworthy the system is. A conceptual framework of trustworthiness is applied to digital twins, with the three elements of trustworthiness being: ability, integrity and benevolence. The chapter examines how digital twins can be designed to be trustworthy by explicitly considering the role of socio-political values in data generation and analysis, especially that of information privacy law.