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Home – Artificial Intelligence News – Why Privacy Matters

We are living in the midst of an ongoing and accelerating artificial intelligence revolution. That revolution leads to many possible futures, some beautiful and some terrifying. One possible future is a world of mass surveillance in which everything you say and do is meticulously recorded and analyzed, and even the content of your thoughts can be predicted or “inferred.”China has led the way, constructing an AI-powered network of online and physical surveillance technology to monitor citizens, manipulate narratives, and crush dissent. Even some Western nations have fallen prey to the temptations of mass surveillance. Edward Snowden called the United Kingdom’s online data retention law, also known as the “Snooper’s Charter,” the “most extreme surveillance in the history of Western democracy.”Here in the United States, concerns about government surveillance are rising, as evidenced by the recent uproar over automated license plate readers, such as Flock Safety’s roadside cameras.

Privacy advocates have mapped over 137,000 automated license plate readers across the country. While readers have been used to solve a number of serious crimes, including kidnappings, reports have surfaced about mistaken arrests and police officers abusing the technology to stalk former romantic partners.The recent uproar over Flock cameras is a symptom of Americans’ growing unease with AI’s power to track, analyze, and even anticipate their behavior, both online and in the physical world.

Americans, however, have always been uneasy with intrusive government. The Fourth Amendment, which protects against “unreasonable searches and seizures” of citizens’ “houses, papers, and effects,” arose from the Founding Fathers’ opposition to “general warrants” that empowered royal officials with sweeping power to search anywhere or seize anyone without probable cause.These warrants, which were often used to persecute the crown’s political enemies, were declared by James Otis, a patriot and lawyer, to be the “worst instrument of arbitrary power, the most destructive of English liberty and the fundamental principles of law, that ever was found in an English law-book.”Today, we are challenged to renew........

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