From the course: Introduction to Artificial Intelligence

Privacy concerns

From the course: Introduction to Artificial Intelligence

Privacy concerns

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- In life, there are rules and then there's guidelines. The rules are pretty clear. You shouldn't steal or cheat. The guidelines are a little bit more flexible. Like you should never get a tattoo in a language you don't understand, or you should never eat anything you found in the back of a work fridge. In the United States, privacy is just a set of guidelines. There isn't the type of hard and fast rules that you see in other countries. Many large companies are free to collect your data. They can use that data to train their AI models and even sell your data to a third party. A lot of what keeps companies from collecting everything is the response that they'd get from their customers. When people use their smartphone or their credit card, they don't want to have a sense of who owns that data. In the United States, the courts have often said that you can't get protection for facts. That means that all the contact names in your phone's address book are not protected. At first, it might sound strange that your list of friends or your credit card transactions don't belong to you, but courts have often held that this data belongs to whoever collects it. If you install an address book app, they can't own your facts, but they can own the database. You can almost think of it like a recipe book where they can't own the ingredients, but they can own the cooking, preparation and description. They can't own your friends' names, but they can own a database that contains those names. They may even include how many times they call and where they call from. Privacy protection is about creating a barrier between your personal information and your ability to freely move through society. Almost everyone has some expectation of privacy. People will usually say things to their friends that they wouldn't say to a stranger. Most people act differently at home than they would on a public bus. Privacy protection can replicate these barriers through laws and regulation. These rules can put restrictions on what companies do with your data, but they can also allow you to request that that data about you is deleted. So think about it this way. Imagine that you're working on a team that's developing an AI system. This system relies on a massive amount of data. If you gather a lot of personal information, there are good regulations to follow in the European Union. If your customer lives in the United States, then a lot of the privacy guidelines are based on perception. These are the general perceptions that your company conveys about how much they care about privacy. If customers discover that you collect massive data, then they might develop negative perceptions about your company. The company Meta was collecting enormous amount of data about their customers. Most of the data capture was legal, but when customers found out, they were less inclined to use their products. In a sense, Meta ignored the guidelines. If many of your customers are in the United States, it's important to focus more on guidelines. Remember, if there's no rule against it, it doesn't mean that it's in your company's best interests. If your company is perceived to be bad on privacy, it could have a real impact on your success.

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