Data, privacy, good AI, and stupid AI

With so many hands after my data, I occasionally think about the extent to which personal data should be protected.

Beyond the obvious - the attributes that the system so depends on to uniquely identify you and if stolen could lead to identity theft, such as your SIN and birth date - is your more mundane personal data worth protecting? Or do you trust that by making more data about yourself available, it will feed an ever-growing profile that allows public and non-public organizations to serve you better?

My answer is that I'm not too concerned about protecting my own trivial data. But having seen what #metoo can do to people with very little evidence - and really this was just a capstone on what has been emerging for a decade or more - I am concerned about protecting the data of people who want to exercise their democratic rights or perhaps even act to sustain them.

I'm not really the agitating type, but I recognize that we need agitators. We need journalists (and we need to pay for our journalism so that the people who want to sell us things don't pay them instead). We need whistleblowers. We need politicians who speak up when they see something that isn't right (and we need to stop assuming that all politicians are up to no good - else what genuinely upstanding person would want to do the job?).

I don't want to see those valuable people Shanghaied into keeping quiet because of some hijacked data that could be twisted to concoct a negative story that isn't that bad in the grand scheme of things but could still be fed to a shallow media to rapidly shut someone down.

So, that's my position at the moment - we need to collectively be concerned about privacy to protect the people whose privacy is most important in society, even if that's not our own.

Beyond that, my main personal concern is that I don't want faulty AI making stupid decisions with my data and presenting these decisions to human decision makers who decide my fate in various minor ways each day. We don't know what will be possible in 10 years with data that is harvested today. Who imagined that someone would be able to determine your name from a photograph you posted online 10 years ago as is increasingly possible these days?

The very best AI will be extremely valuable to society and this AI will be in the miniscule minority. The rest will be used to squeeze private profit from dust with the mental health of society receiving collateral damage.