Big Brother Bargain: Can Governments Bypass Your Rights by Paying Up?

Recent article on third-party data, data privacy and Artificial Intelligence (AI) as featured in Digital Law Asia

Attorney Ken Sterling had this article published on topic and here is what he shared:

What if the attacks of September 11, 2001 or Oklahoma City could have been prevented? How about school shootings, the mosque shooting in New Zealand or the terrorist attack in Tehran? Should governments be allowed to use third-party data and AI in the interest of national security, or to prevent, detect and prosecute crime? Can AI be an ethical and legal solution to address privacy concerns and eliminate the need for a search warrant?

Governments claim that when they have access to user data, they can prevent or detect crime. Balancing the needs of public safety against individual privacy rights has become increasingly complex, especially with the ubiquity of smartphones, authorized data collection, and the amount of information people freely share on social media. The irony and bitter truth is that individual private data has been voluntarily given away by them in exchange for access to free applications, such as Google Search, Gmail, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. It is widely known that technology and marketing companies trade this data so why should a higher standard be placed on governments? Governments are able to purchase data from third-party data providers, such as Fog Data Science, LLC.[1]

This article explores the ability of governments to purchase third-party data from brokers without a search warrant, provided that users have voluntarily consented to sharing the data. Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be implemented to address legal and ethical privacy concerns. AI can be a non-biased and anonymous methodology to process, sort, search, and analyze vast amounts of third-party data, solely for the purposes of identifying (“flagging”) data signals that indicate higher probabilities of criminal activity and threats to public safety.

For the full article, click here.