Clicks and Tricks: Is Our Privacy Disappearing into Big Tech’s Black Box AI?

In an age of smart devices and digital assistants, it can feel like our lives are increasingly enveloped in artificial intelligence. As AI technology advances, tech giants are able to gather more data about our behaviors, interests, and preferences. This raises pressing concerns around privacy and transparency. Just how much of our personal information are Big Tech companies able to access through their black box AIs? Should we be worried that our privacy is slowly disappearing as AI becomes more omnipresent?

The Allure and Risks of AI

Artificial intelligence promises to make our lives more convenient. With Siri, Alexa and other voice assistants, we can get information, play music, and control smart devices hands-free. Recommendation algorithms serve up personalized content and shopping suggestions tailored to our tastes. Chatbots can answer customer service inquiries without the wait. Self-driving cars could revolutionize transportation.

The capabilities of AI systems are impressive and growing rapidly. But there are also risks that come with handing over so much data and decision-making power to complex algorithms we don’t fully understand. AI has been described as a “black box” because the inner workings are often proprietary and opaque. We typically don’t know what data is being collected about us or how algorithms are using it behind the scenes.

Privacy Concerns Around Data Collection

Tech companies rely on amassing vast quantities of user data to train and improve their AI systems. The more they know about our interactions, the better they can customize and target their services. Voice assistants constantly listen and analyze speech. Website trackers follow our online activity. Retailers record our purchases. GPS logs our locations.

While this data enables helpful features, it also represents an intrusive level of surveillance into our personal lives. And once collected, our data could potentially be used in other concerning ways, like targeted advertising or discriminatory decision-making.

Lack of Transparency in AI Systems

In addition to data collection practices, the decision-making of AI systems themselves tend to be opaque. Companies rarely provide full details about their proprietary algorithms due to competitiveness. But this lack of transparency means we typically don’t know exactly how or why an AI arrived at a particular output or suggestion for us.

We are left to trust that the systems will operate fairly and ethically, without embedded biases or errors. For AI handling sensitive tasks like financial lending, job recruitment and criminal justice, this blind trust could have serious societal consequences.

How Much Does Big Tech Know About You?

Many consumers underestimate just how much of their personal data tech giants are able to collect through AI-powered devices and services. Let’s look at some specific examples:

Amazon Echo

• Always listening – The Echo device is constantly listening for its wake word. Audio recordings of conversations in your home may be retained and analyzed by Amazon.
• Voice recognition – Echo can distinguish between family members by analyzing vocal patterns. This allows for personalized responses, but also detailed voice profiles.
• Purchase history – As an Amazon device, Echo has access to your Amazon shopping habits, wish lists, and recommondations.
• Smart home integrations – Controlling other smart devices allows Echo to learn about your home activities and habits.
• Location tracking – Echo devices have location sensors that can pinpoint your home address and where you carry Alexa-enabled devices.

Google Services

• Web tracking – Google Analytics, ads and other services follow your online activity, searches, video views, email content and more.
• Locations – Through your phone’s GPS, Google Maps, and local searches, Google logs your real-world movements and favorite places.
• User profiles – Extensive ad profiles are compiled from your searches, sites visited, demographics and interests. These are used to target ads.
• Voice and audio data – Google Assistant devices analyze your voice commands, questions, and conversations. Nest devices can also capture audio.
• Daily habits – Through your calendar, commute details, email content and activity on services like YouTube, Google gains insights into how you spend your time.
• Social connections – Your connections and communications in Gmail, Drive and other Google services reveal who you interact with.

Facebook

• Likes and follows – Your activity on Facebook pages and Instagram accounts paints a picture of your hobbies, opinions, lifestyle and identity.
• Facial recognition – Facebook’s AI automatically identifies faces in photos and videos you upload or are tagged in.
• Profile info – Birthdate, hometown, work, education and relationship details provide demographic data points.
• Location tracking – Though optional, location services log real-world movements and visits to businesses.
• Web and app activity – The Facebook pixel tracks your non-Facebook web browsing. SDKs in apps send usage data back to Facebook.
• Messages – The content of your private messages on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp could be analyzed for ad targeting.
• Contacts – Facebook receives your phone contacts, call logs, and messaging app data through address book upload features.

This sweeping access to our digital lives and even movements in the physical world gives Big Tech unparalleled insights compared to what any one person can observe or remember. All enabled by AI in the background, crunching the data.

Perils of the “Surveillance Economy”

Tech industry insiders have sounded the alarm about the rise of a “surveillance economy,” fueled by the data extraction capabilities of AI. In this economic model, users essentially pay for free services by allowing their private data to be relentlessly harvested, analyzed, aggregated and sold.

Legal scholar Shoshana Zuboff likens behavioral data mining to industrial factories that transform raw materials into profits. But instead of natural resources, she argues Big Tech’s valuable asset is the data they mine from our lived experiences in the modern world.

And the more data fed into AI systems, the more they can profile, predict and influence our behavior. Like a self-reinforcing cycle, AI enables more invasive data collection, which trains even smarter AI to collect yet more data. Where does it end? And how much power over our lives are we willing to hand over to black box algorithms designed first and foremost to maximize user engagement and company profits?

Filter Bubbles

There are also concerns that hyper-personalized content recommendations keep users trapped in a “filter bubble” that gradually narrows their worldview. AI can learn our biases and preferences through data, then customize our feeds and search results to align with our existing opinions and beliefs.

This could isolate us from diverse perspectives and reinforce polarization, misinformation, and extremism. Without transparency, we may not even realize how our view of the world is being carefully filtered by algorithms aiming to keep us engaged on apps and sites.

Automated Decision-Making

More troublingly, AI is increasingly used to directly make or inform high-stakes decisions about people’s lives, such as creditworthiness, employability, medical diagnoses, and parole terms. When the AI models contain technical flaws or implicit biases from flawed data, this can lead to harmful discrimination.

Yet companies deploying these automated decision systems rarely share exactly how they arrive at outcomes, making it impossible to audit for fairness and accuracy. Individuals suffer the consequences while companies hide behind the opacity of proprietary algorithms.

Lack of Legal Protections Around AI

In the United States, there are currently no comprehensive federal laws governing the ethical development and use of AI technology. Instead, we rely on companies to set their own standards for data practices and algorithmic transparency. But the financial incentives can lead businesses to prioritize engagement, growth and profit over user privacy and agency.

The EU has passed more stringent regulations, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the proposed Artificial Intelligence Act. The GDPR gives EU citizens more control over their personal data collected by companies. The AI Act seeks to classify certain AI applications into risk categories and restrict or prohibit high-risk systems, such as biometric identification, that could threaten people’s safety or fundamental rights.

Until similar laws are enacted in the US to rein in unregulated AI systems and data mining, consumers have little power to demand transparency or accountability around how their information is collected and used for automated decision-making by Big Tech. For now, we have little choice but to accept vague privacy policies and end user license agreements if we want to use free platforms and convenient AI assistants.

Calls for Algorithmic Transparency

In the face of Big Tech’s unchecked AI capabilities, advocacy groups, researchers, and policy experts have issued calls for “algorithmic transparency.” True transparency would involve disclosing the following:

• What training data is used to build AI models. This allows auditing for quality and biases.
• What user data is collected and analyzed by AI systems. This enables informed consumer consent.
• How AI models arrive at their outputs and decisions. This permits scrutiny of the technology’s logic and effects.
• What measures are in place to monitor for accuracy and fairness. This promotes accountability.
• Who is responsible when AI systems cause harm or errors. This assigns liability.

Tech companies argue revealing too much about their proprietary algorithms would undermine their competitive edge. But transparency advocates point out the significant public interest and harm reduction benefits of opening these black boxes – much like environmental impact reports or warning labels on hazardous products.

While AI developers may need to protect certain intellectual property details, calls for transparency are not unreasonable given the technology’s broad societal impacts. If Big Tech cannot use AI responsibly, they should not deploy it at all.

Regaining Agency in the Age of AI

Until stronger regulations are enacted, individuals are left to navigate the twin threats of intrusive data collection and opaque algorithmic systems largely on their own. Here are some tips to protect your privacy and autonomy in your daily use of AI technology:

• Minimize sharing of sensitive personal information online or via apps and services. This starves algorithms of individualized data to profile you.
• Avoid enabling location tracking in apps and voice assistants when possible. This stops your real-world movements from being logged.
• Opt out of targeted advertising through platform privacy settings and ad choice sites. This limits advertiser data gathering.
• Periodically review and prune your social media posts, contacts and personal info. This prevents creating a data “shadow self” that doesn’t match who you are now.
• Vary your online activity rather than establishing routines AI can predict. This makes your behavior harder to model.
• Patronize smaller companies with less data mining capacity when alternatives exist.
• Read privacy policies closely and limit usage of apps and devices that demand excessive data access.
• Support initiatives to enact stronger consumer AI protections and regulations.

The goal is not necessarily to unplug entirely from modern technology. But we can be more informed about how our data gets used by AI, limit what we share and diversify the sources we rely on to reduce over-dependence on apps built first for engagement and profit.

Small individual choices may not seem significant alone. But collectively, more conscious technology usage and demands for accountability can potentially curb abuses of our privacy before it disappears entirely into Big Tech’s black boxes.

Frequently Asked Questions

How does Big Tech use AI to gather so much personal data?

Big Tech companies use various AI technologies like machine learning algorithms, predictive analytics, and natural language processing to harvest vast amounts of data:

• Smart assistants use voice recognition and NLP to analyze user commands and speech patterns.
• Website trackers and ad pixels employ algorithms to follow online activity across sites and devices.
• Mapping services use location data points from phones to log mobility patterns.
• Product and content recommendations are personalized via collaborative filtering algorithms.
• Facial recognition automatically identifies people in images uploaded to social media.

This constant AI-powered surveillance enables tech platforms to assemble detailed behavioral and interest profiles on users for ad targeting or product improvements.

What are examples of algorithmic biases and errors?

AI systems built on flawed or biased training data can exhibit many issues:

• Racial and gender discrimination in facial recognition tech wrongly identifies certain groups more often.
• Resume screening algorithms discount women and minority candidates due to past prejudices baked into the data.
• Health risk assessment tools underestimate risk for Black patients leading to improper treatment.
• Fraud detection scores misclassify some low-income neighborhoods as higher risk due to historical biases.
• Product recommendations can conform to and reinforce cultural stereotypes.

Correcting biases involves carefully auditing data and algorithms to identify and address areas of discrimination or mismatch with reality.

How does the EU regulate AI algorithms versus the US?

The EU has been more proactive about regulating AI systems:

• GDPR gives users more control over their data and its uses. Companies must disclose algorithmic processing.
• The proposed Artificial Intelligence Act would categorize AI by risk level and restrict certain applications like biometric ID systems.
• The Digital Services Act requires tech platforms to combat illegal content and Algorithmic Accountability obligations enhance AI transparency.

The US has no comprehensive federal laws specifically governing AI systems. Some argue this fosters innovation, while critics say it allows harms to go unchecked. A patchwork of state privacy and algorithmic accountability laws are now emerging.

What are the benefits of algorithmic transparency?

Requiring more openness about AI systems enables:

• Auditing algorithms for bias, accuracy, and fairness. Hidden problems can be addressed.
• Informing consumers and empowering consent about data collection practices. This builds trust.
• Ensuring accountability when errors or harm occurs. Blame can be properly assigned.
• Promoting public debate about appropriate AI uses. This guides ethically aligned progress.
• Verifying AI reaches standards and complies with regulations through ongoing review. Keeps companies honest.

Reasonable transparency does not mean total disclosure of proprietary technical details. But it prevents AI from being deployed as unaccountable black boxes with unchecked impacts on society.

What are strategies individuals can use to protect their privacy from invasive data collection?

Some tips for individuals looking to minimize invasive data gathering by companies:

• Review app permissions and limit access to contacts, microphone, camera, location, etc.
• Turn off ad personalization settings and opt out of tracking through websites like aboutads.info.
• Use privacy-focused services like search engines (DuckDuckGo), browsers (Firefox), and email (ProtonMail) when possible.
• Be selective about sharing personal data like birthdate, address, school and job details on social media.
• Use prepaid anonymous debit/credit cards for online purchases to avoid profiling.
• Disable location tracking in apps and consider using a VPN to mask your IP address from tracking.
• Periodically review and tighten social media privacy settings and prune old posts and info.

How can everyday citizens help advocate for stronger AI protections and oversight?

Citizens have several options to push for greater AI transparency and accountability:

• Contact your elected representatives to voice support for enhanced AI regulations.
• Participate in public comment periods on proposed rules at regulators like the FTC and FCC.
• Use Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to uncover details on government algorithm use.
• Support digital rights organizations engaged in policy reform and litigation efforts.
• Download apps like Algoritmiq that audits tech company practices and allows you to send auto-generated complaint letters.
• Discuss concerns and expectations around responsible AI development with engineers in your network.
• Write reviews and vote with your wallet when companies deploy invasive technologies without regard for privacy.

Collective activism and pressures are needed counter the powerful Big Tech lobby opposing new regulations that could eat into profits.

The Road Ahead

Artificial intelligence offers tremendous benefits but also risks significant harm if deployed without appropriate oversight. As AI capabilities expand in the coming years, we are approaching a crossroads regarding public transparency and accountability.

Will we allow Big Tech’s data and algorithms to operate behind closed doors, regarding users as products to be monitored and nudged? Or will society and regulators intervene to prioritize human interests over conveniently frictionless and personalized services?

By raising awareness around the privacy tradeoffs and demanding reform, conscious consumers and voters can potentially steer the path toward ensuring AI enhances our lives without encroaching on liberty and agency. But achieving the right balance of innovation and regulation remains an immense challenge in the digital age. The only certainty is we cannot afford to ignore the growing influence algorithms have over what we see, do and think as individuals and a society.