Safeguarding Privacy in the Era of Artificial Intelligence

The Rise of the Robots?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become a powerful tool that is rapidly gaining relevance in our everyday lives. As AI continues to grow and evolve, the concerns surrounding privacy and data protection grow with it. This blog post delves into the intersection of privacy and artificial intelligence, exploring the challenges in safeguarding personal information and how El Toro provides solutions to reach customers while prioritizing transparency and accuracy.

Understanding AI, Data, and Your Privacy

AI needs data just as your car needs gas, both systems will simply not function without them. Similarly, the better the gas you put in your car, the better it will run. This principle applies to AI too, the better data you give it, the better results it will spit out. Tech people like to use the saying garbage in, garbage out. So where does AI get this data? What does it do with it? How do you know when you are giving your data up? And what happens when someone with bad intentions wants to get to it? We will take a deeper dive into these questions below:

Data Collection

Data collection is easier than ever these days. Heck, you probably give your personal data up voluntarily, it's called social media. But what few people know is the terms and conditions of many of these social media platforms. Facebook, for instance, has received a great deal of criticism over the years for the amount of data it has on its users. “Facebook can learn almost anything about you by using artificial intelligence to analyze your behavior,” said Peter Eckersley, the chief computer scientist for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Most often data from websites and social media is sold to large commercial databases to be used in advertising and profiling. 

Now however, your browsing habits, website data, and social media data in these large databases can be used to train AI into targeting you with content more tailored to your preferences, more on that later.

Profiling and Personalization

AI is really good at building user profiles from the personal information that it gets from databases. While this can greatly enhance your online experience by providing search results more tailored to you, it can also raise concerns about the misuse of personal information, plus it's a little creepy. This misuse of information is concerned with advertising ethics and the inherent bias that AI has. AI bias is not intentional, it comes from the information the system is given by its programmers.  Some people call it ‘Human Bias’, which is common in any of today’s AI systems as they are really not true AI, but rather Machine Learning Algorithms (but for the purposes of this article we’ll stick with the AI verbiage).  If the AI is not given unbiased information, it won’t give users 100% unbiased results. As we talked about earlier, garbage in, garbage out. Unfortunately, with the vast amounts of data needed to train an AI, it's almost impossible to make sure everything the AI sees is balanced on all sides. In a recent example, Amazon, IBM, and Microsoft had to stop giving police access to their AI facial recognition systems after the software regularly misidentified people across the United States leading to numerous false arrests. 

Data Security

With all of this data about you in the cloud, you might be concerned about someone you don’t want accessing it. Cybercriminals are everywhere, right? Many database compromises are not specifically targeting your sensitive data. In fact, most database breaches are done to extort the company holding the data as hackers hold the hacked information for ransom. 

IP Targeting vs. AI Targeting

With all of the concerns about AI and privacy, we want to keep you updated on how innovations in this space affect El Toro. We're pleased to say, the rise of AI and the privacy concerns that come with it are not cause for concern from us. El Toro’s patented IP Targeting technology circumvents the inaccuracies and bias prevalent in AI. Our patented technology relies on IP addresses to be up to 95% accurate in identifying and targeting potential customers. Furthermore, our commitment to transparency and privacy is at the core of our business model, always making sure we collect the minimum data required to complete tasks and not relying on massive databases full of unnecessary and potentially sensitive data.