Darren Shou writes:

When the European Union enacted the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) a year ago, one of the most revolutionary aspects of the regulation was the “right to be forgotten”—an often-hyped and debated right, sometimes perceived as empowering individuals to request the erasure of their information on the internet, most commonly from search engines or social networks.

Since then, the issue of digital privacy has rarely been far from the spotlight. There is widespread debate in governments, boardrooms, and the media on how data is collected, stored, and used, and what ownership the public should have over their own information. But as we continue to grapple with this crucial issue, we’ve largely failed to address one of the most important aspects—how do we control our data once it’s been fed into the artificial intelligence (AI) and machine-learning algorithms that are becoming omnipresent in our lives?

Virtually every modern enterprise is in some way or another collecting data on its customers or users, and that data is stored, sold, brokered, analyzed, and used to train AI systems. For instance, this is how recommendation engines work—the next video we should watch online, the next purchase, and so on, are all driven by this process. [Continue reading…]