Liking privacy, and lots of adverts too
By now you would have noticed the many e-mails you’ve been receiving from all your web services updating their privacy policies. The reason for this is a very important regulation in the EU that became effective on Friday called General Data Protection Regulation or GDPR. Essentially, it provides for tighter restrictions in data protection and privacy for all individuals on the internet across the EU, and soon the world.
The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) has necessitated better protection for consumers as a very sophisticated internet and more accurate machine-learning technology bring with them benefits in many sectors but also serious risks to humanity.
That is why we were joined by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg at #VivaTech in Paris a day before GDPR came into being.
Given the recent events at Facebook around Cambridge Analytica, Zuckerberg’s company is probably the one everyone is looking to for ways to manage the benefits of AI in the face of its obvious risks.
“What’s clear now is that we did not take a broad enough view of how people could use our tools for harm. That goes for fake news, interference in elections, hate speech, and developers using our tools in ways that don’t respect people’s privacy.
“We need to take a broader view of our responsibility to ensure we are not just reacting to these issues as they come up but taking a more proactive view and trying to prevent them from arising in the first place,” said Zuckerberg.
“Everyone must have control. There needs to be transparency about how your information is used and there needs to be accountability. Someone will use one of our services about 100-billion times a day, either to send a message to someone, or to post a photo or a link, and every time that happens, it’s clear who you want to share that content with.
“One of the good things that regulation can do is increase public trust that these systems are working and that they respect people’s privacy. We have worked very hard with a lot of people to ensure that we are in complete compliance with the strong regulations that GDPR brings with it, and now that we’ve done this for Europe, we want to make sure everyone around the world has the same controls.
“So we’ve announced that we are going to roll out all of the controls for GDPR across the world in the next few weeks,” Zuckerberg said.
However, there is the little matter of making money. The business model of Facebook is based on its ability to offer a free service to its 2.2-billion users and in turn use that community’s data to sell targeted advertising.
The question therefore arises: How will Facebook exercise the commercial rationale of AI and other technologies in gathering data about me based on the information I have shared on its services, and how will it use that data in a responsible way to sell me as a sales prospect to an advertiser? Zuckerberg did not mince his words. He reminded his audience that the mission of Facebook was to connect people and help bring the world together. And since Facebook wants to connect the world, it must keep the service free, otherwise those who cannot afford a paid-for service will not get connected, which defeats the purpose.
What this means is that someone must pay for it. Facebook has taken the view that advertising will do that. So whether you share your information or not, if you use any of its services, you will get advertising. Finish and klaar . In response to what Facebook knew was coming, it recently launched a “clear history” service.
Zuckerberg said this was inspired by a feature one typically finds in a web browser, namely the ability to clear your history and start browsing from scratch without any information previously stored.
This may make your web experience a little harder or more cumbersome, necessitating the need, in some cases, to reenter passwords.
However, the idea is to give users the option to delete their data.
Soon you will be able to do the same on your Facebook or Instagram account. Great news, right? Not so fast.
Remember, whether you share your data or not, you will still get advertising.
So if you press this big red button, prepare yourself to start getting adverts and newsfeeds that are not relevant to you. This is the reason why, according to Zuckerberg, many of Facebook’s users have chosen to opt in to services that know them and their interests better — because if you’re going to get adverts and newsfeeds, you’d rather get the ones you like or actually need.
Artificial intelligence is here to stay and will increasingly become a bigger part of our lives. It’s best we seek to find the more humane side of it.
✼ Khumalo is chief operating officer of MSG Afrika
We did not take a broad enough view of how people could use our tools for harm