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Leenes, Ronald; De Conca, Silvia --- "Artificial intelligence and privacy—AI enters the house through the Cloud" [2018] ELECD 1412; in Barfield, Woodrow; Pagallo, Ugo (eds), "Research Handbook on the Law of Artificial Intelligence" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2018) 280

Book Title: Research Handbook on the Law of Artificial Intelligence

Editor(s): Barfield, Woodrow; Pagallo, Ugo

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN: 9781786439048

Section: Chapter 10

Section Title: Artificial intelligence and privacy—AI enters the house through the Cloud

Author(s): Leenes, Ronald; De Conca, Silvia

Number of pages: 27

Abstract/Description:

After decades of promises, AI is (finally) taking ground in people’s lives. Due to an enormous increase in computing power, significant reductions in storage costs and years of hard study by AI engineers and scientists, the full potential of AI is showing its face. Inferences are made on the basis of information provided by us, the individual profiles created about us, the profiles and behavior of others and the feedback loops that through Machine Learning lead to even better predictions about what we’re up to next. Increasingly we will be surrounded by intelligent helpers in the form of service-robots, care-robots, surgery-robots and more, next to the already prevalent industrial robots. Obviously, in order to work their magic, these devices need input. Not only from their physical environment, but also from us, their masters. This means that they will have to process information from us, about us, and thus affecting us. Whereas one can keep information away from household members relatively easily because they are not always present, this may turn out to be much harder with respect to the omnipresent robot helpers surrounding us in our homes. We may thus be about to yield the trojan horse of surveillance into our castles of seclusion. In this chapter, we explore the relation of intelligent home assistant robots as one particular strand of modern AI, to the law, in particular privacy law and the adjacent field of data protection law. We first outline the central legal notions at play: privacy and data protection and briefly outline the legal framework, focusing specifically at the European Union, being our home turf, and being (one of) the jurisdiction(s) that has the most comprehensive legal framework relating to privacy and data protection. Next, we set the stage with respect to the AI’s of choice, intelligent home assistants, by describing various types of such devices that are either already on the market, or are about to enter it. This is followed by a discussion of a number of data protection and privacy issues introduced, aggravated or solved by these technologies. While the (regulatory) answers to many of the questions posed in this chapter will only come in the following years, this chapter frames the discourse around AI entering the house and its consequences for privacy and data protection, in order to start posing the right questions and advancing some preliminary suggestions for mitigating issues.


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