Dear privacy pros,
The network of regulatory frameworks concerning artificial intelligence initiatives continues to develop apace. Some jurisdictions are positioning to be more welcoming while others are proving more circumspect.
As alluded to in earlier introductions, there is no question appropriate guardrails are needed. For example, a recent report I came across suggested that most AI-driven apps share users' data with third parties, including marketing companies.
The researchers analyzed 159 such apps on the Apple App Store, leveraging the privacy labels that divide commonly-collected user data into 14 categories. Out of these 159 apps, only 25% of apps did not share user data with any third parties.
Of the 75% of apps that partake in third-party sharing, most shared three or four out of the 14 categories of user data with third parties. Socratic by Google took the top spot with five categories of user data, including identifiers, browsing history, contact information, location data and search history.
Even if user data is not shared, companies may still use data collected for internal advertising and marketing purposes. In this regard, it is somewhat encouraging to note that most of apps investigated only used a handful of data categories covered by privacy labels to improve their own marketing efforts, which was less than what I had anticipated. Three of the apps used five categories and one used six.
It was also interesting to see that the most data-hungry apps were not the AI chatbots in the entertainment category, but productivity apps like Google Assistant or education apps like Brainly. Of course, it is arguable that these apps could have legitimate reasons for collecting more information based on what they are used for, and I would probably feel safer giving more information to Google than less information to the developers of entertainment apps.
At the end of the day, while the methodology of this study is fairly superficial, it serves as a pretty good indication of the need to develop suitable regulatory safeguards to ensure that continued innovation in generative AI technology generates more benefit than detriment to consumers all around the world.
I wish you happy reading and have a wonderful weekend ahead.