March 2024 - Respecting data rights: a driver for innovation

This month it’s about how technological innovation can only succeed if it builds in data protection rights, an axiom never more critical than with the growth of AI.
In my column in the Guernsey Press this month, "Why Robots Need Seatbelts", I discussed how innovation needs solid data protection safeguards to ensure its success, and realise its promise in serving societal and economic goals.

As a home-grown illustration of the very real risks of mis-applied technology one needs look no further than the UK Post Office scandal, which I would describe as a perfect storm of:
  • The implementation of technology clearly without adequate checks and verifications.
  • Unchallenged deference to what the stats and numbers say, without questioning whether there could be another explanation for patterns, and
  • Lack of accountability and absence of timely human intervention
I believe it is safe to say that this was a reputational hit that will take the Post Office, and by extension public institutions, a while to recover from.

Well, the stakes have never been as high as they are today with Generative AI (“GenAI”).  GenAI stands as a technological innovation with limitless potential, including for: medicine, education, and combating climate change.

But with the great promise comes unprecedented risks that include:
  • National security where used by a non-friendly state
  • Non-authorised scraping of personal information
  • Accuracy
  • Intellectual property
  • Discrimination
  • And oh yes... don’t forget about those ‘Robots’- as some experts have even identified GenAI as an existential threat to humanity.
I was speaking at an event this month where an AI expert shared the fact that one organization was considering cutting recruitment by 90% given the potential labour displacement of GenAI while another expert pondered whether we are moving towards a synthetic society where we can’t tell what is real/not or is true/not.

The need to amplify benefits and mitigate risk is the very reason why it is vital that data protection safeguards and rights are carefully and thoughtfully factored into Tech innovation generally and most certainly, the introduction of GenAI. 

It is by leveraging the power of these two complementary concepts- Innovation and Data Protection, that we can realize the true promise of technology to advance societal and economic objectives in a manner that respects the Data Protection rights of the individuals that those technologies are intended serve.