How AI could lead to privacy law violations

Advances in AI and widespread adoption of AI agents like chatbots, virtual assistants, and recommendation systems have raised new privacy concerns. As these AI systems collect more personal data and gain capabilities approaching human-level intelligence, they may inadvertently violate privacy laws or expose users' personal information in problematic ways.

One major privacy risk with AI agents is around data collection practices. Many AI systems rely on harvesting large volumes of user data, including personal details, conversation transcripts, location history, and browsing habits. This data is used to train machine learning models to improve the agent's responsiveness and contextual awareness.

However, the scope of data collection is rarely transparent to users. Even in companies with the best of intentions, sensitive data could be collected without explicit consent, sold to third parties, or used for unauthorized purposes - clear violations of almost all privacy law regimes around the world.

AI agents may also struggle with securing stored personal data from cyber threats. As machines, it goes without saying they may not always act as we would expect a human being guided by social norms to act. They may fail to recognize vulnerabilities in their data storage systems or allow access that shouldn’t occur. Such failures can expose people to identity theft, financial scams, discrimination, manipulation, and all the other harms that flow from data breaches.  

Moreover, the actions of AI agents are not always predictable, explainable or fair - raising due process concerns. Will users have the ability to understand that automated decisions are affecting them and contest those decisions.  

Overall the rise of increasingly independent AI agents presents a collision of challenges around transparency, informed consent, data protection, and technical accountability.

While some argue we need more robust privacy safeguards to guarantee users' rights, we at Waltzer are more inclined to see current privacy law regimes as sufficient if there is a willingness to enforce the rules we have. We predict that with public concern around the technology widespread, there will be more regulatory attention on AI.