An Ethical Horizon for Artificial Intelligence (Part 1/4)

Self-governance leadership can improve the future of AI, if companies are brave enough to adopt ethical tools and new business model leadership now.

PART 1

Artificial Intelligence is mature enough for professional ethics, but legal and academic haggling could roll on for many years; as it has with privacy policy governance.  We are in a world quick to fund and produce weaponized artificial intelligence. Commercial AI is leading a quietly unchallenged data reign, relatively unfettered by ethical disciplines.  When examples of poor ethical behaviour involving AI abound, the consumer public can’t necessarily afford to wait for policy wonks to emerge with a brand of consensus.

A significant percentage of the US academic community enamored with AI will continue to enable power differentials actively harming human rights interests. If you leave subjective ethical preferences to academic AI developers exclusively, you may wait behind the political will of public grant funders.  If you leave ethics to the companies who use and market AI, you might invoke consumer or market preferences, take your business elsewhere and still feel the effects of encroachment.

The future would be bright if a business gets a hold of conscious capital principles. For example. the health food market started out rough. It improved every 2-3 years with better quality food sources, increasingly diverse options and adaptation to culinary trends. 30 years later they have managed to pose significant competition to conventional market offerings. Conventional grocers now adopt more health food due to consumer demand. Competition stemming from privacy limitations sharpens the understanding of what is and can be. If you want more privacy in the market, you will have to create it and the environment for it.

Privacy and security positioning shouldn’t take 30 years due to current levels of risk involved.  You also don’t have to wait long because social and technical innovations are already present in the marketplace now.  Smaller companies are in a great position to adopt a flexible level of UI, security and ethics principles from the ground floor.  Larger companies take much longer to retrain their offerings. Loyal consumers should continue to speak up for what they want and affirm the right direction for privacy and security options.

The good news is AI has reached a level of business and adoptive maturity to qualify demand for ethical balances and corporate restraint. Corporate self-governance frameworks can expedite ethics as a deliverable competitive offering to consumers now.  There are de-identification tools and ethics proposals on the table all over the modernizing world from thoughtful social innovators who want computing futures to succeed without harming consumers.

The span of concerns over harm are proportional to AI’s ubiquitous presence in the marketplace. Big Data (machine learning), the Internet of Things(IoT), and drone robotics are examples of AI innovation bearing conflict to human interest.  Social innovation can help manage need in key areas flagged for ethical safeguards like: bias, fair information practice and proprietary rights with accountability. 

I will examine each of these areas for social innovation in the coming days.

COMING NEXT..  An Ethical Horizon for Artificial Intelligence, Bias (Part2/4)

4 Damaging Illusions to Consumer Self-Protection Online

The Internet is a creative, user-endorsed environment supporting information exchanges for every purpose known to man.  So what is it about Internet use that could be so self-defeating when it comes to consumer privacy?

There are a few best-laid deceptions in the marketplace keeping the Internet hostile to personal privacy. 

“The Internet is free."

Have you ever stopped to ask yourself how the Internet can be a multi-billion dollar business and be free to use by so many?   The truth is that the Internet is not ‘free’. Nothing in life is free. There are costs. 

How the Internet pays for free-to-you services, starts with online beacons; which track, trace and evaluate your traffic and identity. This is usually your home or work IP address via your Internet Service Provider.  After awhile you leave a distinct ‘footprint’ online. Then many marketing algorithms compare among each other.  This all takes place hundreds or thousands of miles away from most online consumers at server farms and data brokerage firms.  The data firms keep tabs on any information you volunteer to the “free” service: age, sexual preferences, when you have free time, if you’re working at work or unemployed, what kind of car you drive, so forth and so on.

Then the firms sell it to whomever is buying.  That is how the Internet pays each other millions to stay in business while you use a “free” account.  You are the product they are selling.

“My personal information is protected by US law.”

Test this unfortunate half-truth.  If the government can hack you and never suffer consequence or a corporation can help themselves to your contacts, with no consequences over a period of years, are you being protected by the law?

There are a wide variety of laws, but no holistic federal law to protect all consumer data and personal information. Protected areas of consumer privacy are scattered through a variety of policy areas: health, employment, driver protections, data breach notification.  Protections also vary from State-to-State in the US, but again, no holistic area of coverage. There’s just a sense of policy running scared from your serial outrage in the Capitols of our country.

Some countries and continents have a national consumer data protection policy or law.  In the US, it varies from agency to agency.  So privacy protection according to US nation State and member States remains as spotty as a Jackson Pollack painting.

The best fix for this problem is a fearless examination of State & Federal privacy laws to cover the areas you are most concerned about.  You can do a casual search online or visit your local law library.  The more informed you are, the better decisions you will make when it comes to who you trust with your information.

“I am owed whatever I can get from the Internet.”

Nothing sets you up for failed privacy results more than presuming that someone else’s server farm, computing code and the staff hired to market and manage your transactional information are beholden to you.  If the Internet architects can fool you into believing the space you rented on the currency of your data is actually yours, you are deceived. 

This illusion is typically dispelled by being booted off or banned by an online moderator. Some have attempted campaigns to collect on online company space because they are avid users. They are likely presented with a document created by a very well paid army of lawyers telling them how the information they fed into their system actually belongs to the company because of an End License User Agreement.  That would be the biggest deception of all.

The only thing you own in the cloud is your information and your data. That never changes. If you want to change the balance of user power, you have to stop feeding the beast the data it needs to thrive.

“I erased my data.”

There’s a saying in the privacy field that ‘data never dies’. It is somewhat true. Forensics teams use the same tactics corporate data recovery pros use, say, after a storm surge knocks out computer networks. That’s great news if involuntary data loss would ruin your business or create financial havoc. However, if you wanted to scrub personal information from the online universe you will need to visit a different kind of reputation specialist, like Privacy Duck. 

These service specialists address unique data brokerage and reputation conferencing strata called, People Finders, who license personally identifiable information.  People Finders sell your address, location, work, age and contact information to anyone for any price.  An even less legitimate version of this takes place on the dark web to online criminals. 

THE BOTTOM LINE

If you want to better protect your personal information, adopt a consumer privacy regimen for your household. You are always the best gate-keeper of what goes in and what comes out of every information portal of your life.  Digital privacy is a new consumer discipline.  However, it is having increasingly great & powerful results coaching the market to regard your privacy.

You can be the next person in line to demand anonymized data ecosystems like PDDP, HTTPS, increasingly secured communication, encryption, and ad blockers.  If you already use services like Ghostery, Mozilla private browsing services and anonymizing search engines like, Duck Duck Go, you are on the path to reorganizing an online currency system. 

Online businesses continue to put your privacy on the sacrifice altar when they don't have to.  Your part of the business end of your agreement needs to require privacy by design, warrants for your data, and to anonymize data they use in marketing exchanges. 

Demand better protections. They are technically within reach.