Privacy is the state of keeping something or someone protected or hidden from others. And no one would ever want anyone to access their personal information. But with the advent of recent technological advances privacy has become a pertinent issue.
Data mining, AI and other advanced Internet based techniques pose a threat to privacy and individuals have started to lose control over personal data. 21st century has become the era of Big Data and sophisticated technology. And this all concerns everyone as the meaning and value of privacy is a subject of large debate. The increasing power of AI is muddling the clarity and agreement between privacy which is giving birth to data breach and security issues.
This article focuses on risk artificial intelligence pose on privacy and what future holds.
AI brings the ability to analyze, combine, and gather data from diverse sources, thus increasing information assembling capabilities of social actors that use this technology. The impact of AI on privacy is massive, which is the reason we need to make people aware about the issues.
To know the issues and how Artificial Intelligence is a risk to our privacy consider reading this article further.
Artificial Intelligence and Privacy
What makes AI vital is its information gathering speed, scale, and automation.
The speed at which AI does computation is faster than humans and it can be increased by adding more hardware.
AI fundamentally is designed to use large data sets for analysis and is the only way to process reasonable amount of data in less time.
artificial intelligence machine learning can take care of a task without supervision which helps to improve analysis efficiency.
Undoubtedly these characteristics are mind blowing but there is a downside to this. All these features affect privacy in number of ways.
Ways in which AI affects Privacy
Data Manipulation
From computer software to smart home applications all have certain features that makes them vulnerable to data manipulation by AI. Things get worse when people keep on connecting more devices without knowing how their software and devices share, process, and generate data. And the potential for data manipulation keeps on increasing as we become more reliant on digital technology.
Identification and Tracking
AI is used to watch, find and track individuals across various devices, be it at any public place, home or work. This means even your personal data is anonymized, so that it can become part of big data. But AI is capable of de-anonymizing this data based on reading collected from other devices which means thin line between person and non-personal data is revoked and nothing is personal for AI.
Speech & Facial Recognition
artificial intelligence machine learning is increasingly using two identification methods, voice, and facial recognition. And both these methods have the potential to compromise anonymity in public space. To understand it better, let’s take example of a law enforcement agency who uses facial and voice recognition to find individuals without upholding a proper legal procedure on basis of suspicion thus circumventing what law asks for.
Guess
AI can use machine learning to gather or guess sensitive information from non-sensitive forms of data. For instance, someone’s typing pattern can be used to infer their emotional and mental state such as anxiety, confidence, nervousness, and sadness. Even more, AI is capable of predicting a person’s health, ethnic identity, political views, from that collected data such as location data, activity logs, and similar standards.
Outlining
AI is not only able to gather information, it can also use collected information to sort, classify, evaluate, and rank individuals. This is often done without users consent and no one can challenge the outcome of such tasks. Most common example of it is China’s social scoring system.
Also Read : Can AI Stop Ransomware, Detect Malware and Reduce Risk from Malicious Sources?
How to Protect Your Privacy from AI?
For individuals privacy is a big concern because they are not familiar with the security measures that will help them to stay protected. Therefore, to make things clear, we have listed certain steps that will help anyone reduce the risk and fight increasing data mining efforts.
Use Anonymous Networks to browse the web
To stay protected and keep data privacy intact online users can use anonymous networks like I2P, Freenet or ToR. These networks support end-to-end encryption, meaning transmitted data is secure and it can’t be intercepted.
Use Open-Source Web Browsers
Web browsers plays key role in safeguarding your privacy. Open source browser such as Firefox can easily be check for security issues while Chrome is exclusive. Therefore, choosing Firefox, Midori, Seamonkey browsers is an excellent choice.
Use Open-Source Operating Systems
Like open source web browsers, we have open source operating system. To protect data from being collected switching to them is clever. Unlike Apple and Microsoft who uses variety of backdoors to collect user data Linux is safe to use.
Use Android mobile device
We all know smartphones are greatest risk to privacy, but we cannot stop using. Therefore, to control the use of data using Android devices is a smart choice. Because Microsoft and Apple open-source software. But this doesn’t circumvent the fact that smartphones are risk to privacy.
Must Read : DeepLocker: Weaponizing AI In Malware Development
Conclusion
Modern technologies like AI have brought huge changes in different arenas of our life. The vast amount of data collected and analyzed using these tolls helps to tackle social ills that previously had no solutions. Like every good thing has some cons, AI too have a dark side. Data collected by AI can be used against us and pose risk to our personal data. Loss of privacy is just one example of how digital technologies work to our disadvantage. However, if learn about these technologies and their impact on our life we can acquire ways to defend ourselves from being exploited.
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