Experts stress importance of data privacy in AI era

Data Privacy Day, occurring annually on 28 January, serves as an international effort to raise awareness about data protection and privacy, highlighting the importance for both individuals and organisations to safeguard their information.

Paul Bischoff, Consumer Privacy Advocate at Comparitech, noted that the landscape of data privacy has expanded significantly. "Data privacy used to be about protecting your private information from hackers, criminals, and data brokers. Now we can add AI to that list. AI programs scrape as much data as they can from public sources to train their algorithms. As a result, personal info can be included in an AI's response to a prompt, either intentionally or unintentionally. AI significantly reduces the barriers of finding and collecting information, making it easier for criminals to abuse personal data. I recommend disallowing search engines and other bots from scraping your social media accounts if it's an option, and remove as much identifying personal information from your profiles as possible. Use a data removal service like Incogni or PrivacyBee to get your data out of the hands of data brokers."

Chris Hauk, Consumer Privacy Champion at Pixel Privacy, emphasised the importance of taking proactive measures in protecting personal data. "It's important for users to take control of their data privacy. I strongly recommend contacting data brokers to have your information removed from their servers. Data brokers are popular targets for hackers, putting all the data (your data) on the brokers' servers at risk. While it can be a time consuming process, it is worth it in the long run. If you are pressed for time, subscribe to a service like Incogni, who will contact the data brokers on your behalf, while keeping you informed of their progress."

Hauk further addressed the growing concerns surrounding AI. "AI is also a rising threat to data privacy. As the use of AI rises, so does the threat to customers' data. Organisations must take steps to ensure that they put enough security in place that customer data is not inadvertently shared."

Highlighting another prevalent issue, Hauk remarked, "We continue to see misconfigured data buckets on cloud storage providers like AWS expose data to hackers. Several times, unprotected databases on AWS and other cloud providers have exposed customer and company data to the world, simply because the security protections are misconfigured. This has to stop."

Carlos Aguilar Melchor, Chief Scientist in Cybersecurity at SandboxAQ, also provided insights into evolving strategies for data protection. "Privacy Day highlights the importance of safeguarding personal information and advancing secure systems in an increasingly interconnected world. We are seeing organisations across the globe push toward a Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA) strategy, which underscores a shift to "never trust, always verify" principles, enhancing data security and resilience against cyber threats. Simultaneously, the ongoing transition to Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) is crucial to future-proofing encryption against the potential risks posed by quantum computing, ensuring privacy and security in the digital age. We are proud to be contributing to these initiatives through cryptography modernization, and to reflect a proactive approach to evolving privacy challenges."

The statements from these experts underline the necessity for individuals and organisations to remain vigilant and proactive in their efforts to safeguard data in an ever-evolving digital landscape.