The end of privacy?

Frazier is an assistant professor at the Crump College of Law at St. Thomas University and a Tarbell fellow.

Americans have become accustomed to leaving bread crumbs of personal information scattered across the internet. Our scrolls are tracked. Our website histories are logged. Our searches are analyzed. For a long time, the practice of ignoring this data collection seemed sensible. Who would bother to pick up and reconfigure those crumbs?

In the off chance someone did manage to hoover up some important information about you, the costs seemed manageable. Haven’t we all been notified that our password is insecure or our email has been leaked? The sky didn’t fall for most of us, so we persisted with admittedly lazy but defensible internet behavior.

Artificial intelligence has made what was once defensible a threat to our personal autonomy. Our indifference to data collection now exposes us to long-lasting and significant harms. We now live in the “inference economy,” according to professor Alicia Solow-Niederman. Information that used to be swept up in the tumult of the Internet can now be scrapped, aggregated and exploited to decipher sensitive information about you. As Solow-Niederman explains, “seemingly innocuous or irrelevant data can generate machine learning insights, making it impossible for an individual to anticipate what kinds of data warrant protection.”

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Our legal system does not seem ready to protect us. Privacy laws enacted in the early years of the internet reflect a bygone era. They protect bits and pieces of sensitive information but they do not create the sort of broad shield that’s required in an inference economy.

The shortcomings of our current system don’t end there. AI allows a broader set of bad actors to engage in fraudulent and deceptive practices. The fault in this case isn’t the substance of the law — such practices have long been illegal — but rather enforcement of those laws. As more actors learn how to exploit AI, it will become harder and harder for law enforcement to keep pace.

Privacy has been a regulatory weak point for the United States. A federal data privacy law has been discussed for decades and kicked down the road for just as long. This trend must come to an end.

The speed, scale and severity of privacy risks posed by AI require a significant update to our privacy laws and enforcement agencies. Rather than attempt to outline each of those updates, I’ll focus on two key actions.

First, enact a data minimization requirement. In other words, mandate that companies collect and retain only essential information to whatever service they provide to a consumer. Relatedly, companies should delete that information once the service has been rendered. This straightforward provision would reduce the total number of bread crumbs and, consequently, reduce the odds of a bad actor gathering personal and important information about you.

Second, invest in the Office of Technology at the Federal Trade Commission. The FTC plays a key role in identifying emerging unfair and deceptive practices. Whether the agency can perform that important role turns on its expertise and resources. Chair Lina Khan recognized as much when she initially created the office. Congress is now debating how much funding to provide to this essential part of privacy regulation and enforcement. Lawmakers should follow the guidance of a bipartisan group of FTC commissioners and ensure that office can recruit and retain leading experts as well as obtain new technological resources.

It took decades after the introduction of the automobile for the American public to support seat belt requirements. Only after folks like Ralph Nader thoroughly documented that we were unsafe at any speed did popular support squarely come to the side of additional protections. Let’s not wait for decades of privacy catastrophes to realize that we’re currently unsafe upon any scroll. Now’s the time for robust and sustained action to further consumer privacy.