Discussing with privacy experts about how they like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and privacy, you will get answers ranging from a belief that AI will do great harm to privacy, to the opinion that AI will save our privacy in today’s electronic world. Actually AI has the potential to be both.  

Recent developments in AI technology and the proliferation of data as the power steering of our world have combined to both accelerate on our race to use AI for competitive and public advantage and add the pressure to pump the AI brakes because of privacy and other human issues.

Privacy

AI demands data – sometimes a great amount of data – to train. Plus, one of the advantages of utilizing AI is the ability to sift through a great deal of amounts of data in application. Either way, where those large data sets include personal data, normal privacy concerns of legal basis, agreements, transparency, and data minimization become multiplied.  

Additionally, most data sets were not collected initially with AI training and use in mind. Given the older data in question, it wouldn’t be possible to re-permission those millions of records for AI purposes, which means that the principles of transparency and consent become tougher, if possible to handle. We’ve witnessed this happen on the world’s stage some famous brands having actively taken existing data to train models with an opt-out method.                                                                               

Security

Similar to the security concerns of big data, large pools of data combined for AI purposes bring with them data breach worries.  

Besides, some AI technologies loop back into results information from its searches, meaning that a user with higher level access permissions can bring without his intentions protected data into a new data set giving other users with lower-level access the same access to the new, more sensitive data.  

Misuse

One of the more publicized misuses of AI is to create some unreasonable applications which are believable, realistic videos, pictures, audio, and texts of events never happening.Imagine, for example, seeing a video of yourself making a public statement supporting an ideology which is opposite to your own beliefs.  

Or, as an actor who maintains a living by being on the screen and doing voiceovers for animated characters, seeing your likeness or voice in a movie (but not getting paid). What about ‘fake news’ video clips really similar to real events, but are totally made up? This is especially risky when considering things like political campaigns where AI-created content and misinformation can be disseminated really quickly to drive agendas. 

This challenge can be difficult to get over, as the opacity of some AI training models may unintentionally hide hints of bias, and  AI-generated bias will certainly match up with human bias, making the humans involved less likely to question biased AI output.  

Many of the newer regulatory requirements and bills being considered focus on guarding against bias and discrimination, especially in some certain contexts. Some of the protections contain requiring deep research into bias and discrimination and attestations to fairness, prohibitions against using AI for making significant decisions about people in context without these types of confirmation of fairness, the chance to opt out and object to an AI-driven decision.  

Do the opportunities of AI outweigh the privacy risk?

The dramatic upside of AI done right, however, shows us a thrilling potential future where technology can help us make faster, better, decisions.  

It also gives us the possibility to improve privacy rather than degrade it. Just as humans can deploy AI in ways that help us under the backdrops of medicine, transportation, and business efficiency, the privacy field can find assistance in managing the ever-increasing complexity of consent, third party, and individual rights management.  

Next generation technologies are integrating AI in ways helping automate, thus increasing availability of real-time information and management across geographies, data bases, and practices.  

Additionally, AI can improve security measures. With the assistance of AI, companies can offer consumers more granular, in-context privacy transparency and controls. Through AI, companies also have assistance in managing cross-jurisdictional consent in meaningful ways.  

The key to striking the right balance between making use of the power of AI for privacy and other complex matters while avoiding privacy, security, bias, and other potential pitfalls lies in realizing functional work. Technology, security, and privacy experts must establish privacy into AI tools in collaboration with each other.