Privacy is going to have a renaissance in the age of AI.
Privacy and data protection will need to be built into AI apps and tools such that they become integral parts of the user experience.
They will become indispensable. Not add-ons or after-thoughts. Top priority requirements.
This view is not easy to appreciate because most people see privacy and data protection as relics of a distant past. As our digital world evolves, the concept of responsible and ethical use of people’s data falls further into a black hole of data maximisation, function creep and invisible processing.
Companies grab whatever data they can, use it for whatever purposes they want and all without the data subject’s knowledge.
This is the current state of affairs when it comes to privacy and data protection - nobody seems to really care.
But this is not entirely true.
In terms of the different attitudes towards privacy data and protection, you can broadly fit companies into three categories:
Those that care but struggle with it. They want to be compliant but find the frameworks burdensome, expensive, fragmented, and unpredictable.
Those that don’t care because they’ve made a rational calculation. They’ve looked at the expected cost of non-compliance (probability of enforcement multiplied by severity of penalty), compared it to the opportunity cost of diverting resources from product to compliance, and concluded that privacy and data protection is not worth prioritising yet. They’re not necessarily opposed to compliance; they just don’t think it’s material at their stage.
Those that don’t care because privacy and data protection have never been made to feel important. These companies haven’t even run the calculation of the second group. Compliance exists in a category of things they’ve filed under “boring, abstract, probably not relevant to me right now.” It’s homework. Nobody does homework voluntarily.
There are not many companies in the first group, there are slightly more in the second, but a lot are in the third group.
And you might think AI will only continue this trend. AI development has so far encouraged norms and practices that vanquish basic data protection principles, including purpose limitation, data minimisation and so on.
But this might be about to change.