Artificial intelligence and sensitive inferences: new challenges for data protection laws

Abstract

Data protection regulation is widely considered to be a key legal response to the use of personal information by proliferating information and communications technologies including now artificial intelligence. The catchall acronym of ‘artificial intelligence’ (or ‘AI’) refers to a range of technological developments largely underpinned by machine learning which allows for the prediction and classification of phenomena by training models through labelled data from the real world. There has been significant attention on the capacity of data privacy legislation to effectively regulate the machine learning applications that make use of personal information. One concern has been the deployment of AI to generate sensitive inferences from seemingly anodyne personal data, including metadata. How such inferences should be treated under data protection laws is indeed a great challenge these regimes face in the twenty-first century. Show more