AI and the Future of Privacy

The basic definition of privacy is having the power to seclude oneself, or information about oneself, in order to limit the influence others can have on our behavior. Privacy has been traditionally recognized as a prerequisite for the exercise of human rights such as the freedom of expressions, the freedom of association, and the freedom of choice.

In the information age, privacy hinges on our ability to control how our data is being stored, modified, and exchanged between different parties.

With the advent of advanced internet-based data mining techniques in recent decades, privacy has become a pertinent social issue. Social actors that regularly utilize these techniques, such as government agencies and corporations, are now in the position to identify, profile, and directly affect the lives of people without their consent. And with the emergence of increasingly sophisticated artificial intelligence systems, these privacy concerns have only been exacerbated.

What AI brings to the table is the ability to gather, analyze, and combine vast quantities of data from different sources, thus increasing the information-gathering capabilities of social actors that use this technology. The potential impact of AI on privacy is immense, which is why it is imperative to raise awareness about these issues.

To find out more about how AI is shaping the debate on privacy, consider reading my short guide on the topic, which you can find below.

How AI Can Compromise Privacy

What has made AI attractive for use in information gathering in the first place are three things: speed, scale, and automation. The speed at which AI does computations is already faster than what human analysts are capable of, and it can also be arbitrarily increased by adding more hardware.

AI is also inherently adept at utilizing large data sets for analysis, and is arguably the only way to process big data in a reasonable amount of time. Finally, an AI can perform the designated tasks without supervision, which greatly improves analysis efficiency. These characteristics of AI enable it to affect privacy in a number of different ways:

Data Exploitation

Numerous consumer products, from smart home appliances to computer applications tend to have features that makes them vulnerable to data exploitation by AI. To make the matter worse, people are frequently unaware how much data their software and devices generate, process, or share. And as we become more reliant on digital technology in our everyday lives, the potential for exploitation will only increase.

Identification and Tracking

AI can be utilized to identify, track and monitor individuals across multiple devices, whether they are at work, at home, or at a public location. This means that even if your personal data is anonymized once it becomes a part of a large data set, an AI can de-anonymize this data based on inferences from other devices. This blurs the distinction between personal and non-personal data, which has to be maintained under present legislation.

Voice & Facial Recognition

Voice recognition and facial recognition are two methods of identification that AI is becoming increasingly adept at executing. These methods have the potential to severely compromise anonymity in the public sphere. For example, law enforcement agencies can use facial recognition and voice recognition to find individuals without probable cause or reasonable suspicion, thus circumventing legal procedures that they would otherwise have to uphold.

Prediction

AI can utilize sophisticated machine learning algorithms to infer or predict sensitive information from non-sensitive forms of data. For instance, someone’s keyboard typing patterns can be utilized to deduce their emotional states such as nervousness, confidence, sadness, and anxiety. Even more alarming, a person’s political views, ethnic identity, sexual orientation, and even overall health can also be determined from data such as activity logs, location data, and similar metrics.

Profiling

AI is not just limited to performing information gathering tasks. It can also use information as input for the purpose of sorting, scoring classifying, evaluating and ranking people. This is often done without any consent on the part of the people being categorized, and they often have no ability to affect or challenge the outcomes of these tasks. China’s social scoring system is an example of how this information can be used to limit access to things like credit, employment, housing or social services.

How to Protect Your Privacy

One of the reasons why privacy is such a concern is the fact that people are not sufficiently acquainted with the measures they can use to protect it. To bring some clarity to the matter, I have outlined a number of steps that anyone can take to reduce their online footprint, thereby increasing resistance to data-mining attempts.

Browse through Anonymous Networks

Internet users can opt to use anonymous networks such as Tor, I2P or Freenet to protect their privacy while browsing. These networks support end-to-end encryption, meaning that the data you send and receive can’t be tapped into.

Use Open-Source Web Browsers

Your choice of web browser is another important element in protecting your privacy. Browsers that are open-source such as Firefox can be freely audited for security vulnerabilities, which makes them preferable to proprietary ones like Chrome.

Use Open-Source Operating Systems

OS manufacturers such as Apple and Microsoft have a variety of backdoors which they can use to collect data without permission. A way to circumvent this is to use one of the many, free, open-source Linux distributions.

Use Android Cellphones

Modern smartphones are a privacy risk by design. Both hardware manufacturers and application developers require your data to provide the intended functionality of a phone, but at a cost of losing control of how your data gets used down the line. Android phones are safer than their Microsoft and Apple counterparts thanks to their open-source software, but they still have privacy risks associated with them.

Conclusion

Digital technologies such as AI have made substantial contributions to many areas of our life. The vast quantities of information that we are able to gather and analyze through the use of these tools allow us to tackle social ills that previously had no solutions.

Unfortunately, these technologies can also be used against us by various social actors, from individuals, to corporations, to government agencies. Our loss of privacy is just one example of how technologies such as AI can work to our detriment. However, if we manage to properly understand these technologies, and their impact on our daily life, we will acquire the means to defend ourselves from exploitation by those that wield them with malicious intent.