The Role of AI in Shaping Future Data Privacy Policies

The Impact of AI and Its Importance

In the past, data privacy was straightforward. A business would acquire your first and last name, email, or telephone number, and then request a signature authorizing them to keep that information in a database. Artificial Intelligence has revolutionized everything and is evolving at an unprecedented rate. AI goes beyond mere data aggregation and actively engages in predictive model creation and behavior analysis.

From Storing Data to Smart Guessing 

Even in the absence of a user's personally identifiable information, AI systems are able to determine a user's sensitive attributes. An advertisement, for instance, can ascribe a particular health-related condition to a user based on an analysis of past purchases.

AI can also determine one’s political inclinations based on web browsing activities. Capturing any of the user's interactions—likes, clicks, text, or geolocation—will provide sufficient data to construct a comprehensive user profile.

The Privacy vs. Performance Problem

Privacy laws encourage companies to collect as little data as possible. AI, however, performs better when trained on large and diverse datasets. If too little data is used, AI systems may become inaccurate or biased. If too much data is used, companies risk breaking privacy laws.

Because of this, regulators are shifting their approach. Instead of focusing only on limiting data collection, they now care more about how data is used, who can access it, and how long it is kept. The goal is reducing harm, not just reducing data.

Bias, Deletion, and Real Consequences

AI systems are often tested for bias, especially in areas like hiring, lending, or facial recognition. Ironically, testing for fairness sometimes requires using sensitive data like gender or ethnicity. Avoiding this data completely can hide discrimination instead of preventing it.

Deleting personal data is also harder than it sounds. Once an AI model is trained, information is spread across millions of parameters. Because of this, regulators have started ordering companies to delete entire AI models if they were trained on illegally collected data. This shows how serious AI privacy enforcement has become.

Technology to the rescue

To deal with these challenges, companies are using Privacy Enhancing Technologies. These tools allow AI to learn from data without directly exposing personal information. While effective, they are expensive and complex, making them harder for smaller companies to adopt.

In the future, AI may also help manage privacy itself. AI agents could automatically read privacy policies and decide what data can or cannot be shared based on user preferences. This could reduce the constant clicking of “Accept All,” but it also raises trust issues, especially if these tools are owned by big tech companies.