AI can see you!

AI can only work if it’s supplied with data. And data comes from all of us. What consequences does that have for our privacy?

What developments have we seen so far?

Chinese database

China is working on a database containing the face, iris, voice and DNA of its inhabitants. The police there have special sunglasses that recognise people. Why? To catch criminals or solve crimes quickly. They can also track down missing people faster.

It sounds pretty useful, but what do you think about this? In some big cities in China there are large screens at zebra crossings. There’s a camera on the traffic light, and if you cross on a red light the AI system uses facial recognition to find out who you are. And that’s not all: your face, name and ID number are displayed on the screen.

But what if AI makes a mistake? The well-known Chinese businesswoman Dong Mingzhu was pilloried because she had allegedly crossed on a red light. In fact, she wasn’t even in the city at that time. It turned out that her face was on an advertisement on a bus. When the bus passed the zebra crossing, the system wrongly thought she was crossing on a red light. That error has now been removed from the system.

© Weibo/Police photo

Clearview

You too may already be in such a database. Clearview is a tool that recognises people from their faces. If you have some photos on the Internet with your name under them, you may be in the Clearview database. Even if you haven’t given permission.

ChatGPT

You also hand over a lot of data by asking ChatGPT questions. You can ask ChatGPT what to do if you’re in love with your best friend, but you may feel less comfortable knowing that OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, keeps that information.

Positive note

Different cultures take different views of this. In China, few people seem to have a problem with such close monitoring. However, people may not dare to criticise the government that much in China, so we can’t know for sure that they really don’t have a problem with it.

In Europe, our privacy is well protected. Thanks to the GDPR privacy legislation, businesses must ask permission to use your data first. The only thing is, we ourselves aren’t always that careful. After all, you probably click on “Accept all cookies” just like everyone else, right?

The European Union also has a new law, the AI Act. Among other things, it prohibits social scoring systems. So if you behave badly in Europe you won’t lose points and hence access to certain services (such as buying plane tickets or applying for a loan).

The AI Act also states that businesses aren’t allowed to simply scour the Internet for images to create a database.

And even if you’ve given permission for your data to be used, you can withdraw it afterwards.