Digital twin and digital identity: concept, correlation, meaning in the process of committing cybercrimes and in law in general

The modern development of computer technologies is accompanied by an increasing immersion of a person into the virtual world, where he often spends many hours. The longer a person uses a computer and various electronic gadgets, the more traces he leaves. In fact, there is a situation in which a digital copy or digital twin of a person appears in the virtual world. This phenomenon is new to legal science and requires its own research. The purpose of the article is to analyze the concept of «digital twin» and its development, to study the approaches of foreign and Russian authors from various fields of knowledge to the definition of this term, to identify the possibilities of using this concept in the legal sphere. When writing the article, the following methods are used: comparative legal, analysis and synthesis. The following results are obtained: every computer and gadget user has his «digital copy», a kind of «digital twin», on behalf of which a person performs various, including criminal actions in the virtual space. Public relations in the cyberspace are largely not regulated by law, and when developing a framework for regulating such specific legal relations, it is necessary to begin with the definition of the subject. The authors pay special attention to the question of equating a digital identity with a real one, as well as the lack of legislative regulation of the legal status of a digital twin. The discrepancy between such categories as «digital identity» and «digital twin» is shown. A more correct definition of a digital twin is proposed for legal regulation, in particular for identifying the account with which the Internet crime was committed - a digital identity twin. The paper also proposes the basic principles for the subsequent legal regulation of public relations arising and developing in the cyberspace and lays the foundation for further research on the topic of legal regulation of the digital twin.