The acquisition, storage, and use of personal data by governments and corporations can have benefits and potential misuse for citizens, consumers, and society. Access to personalized services, which results in enhanced efficiency, is a significant benefit. Access to personalized data allows governments and corporations to identify trends and patterns that can be used to optimize processes. This data can also be used for research, which can result in essential advancements in healthcare and even technology. However, the main concern that comes with big data is that of privacy violations. Access to private information can lead to abuse, misuse, or unauthorized access, resulting in discrimination and profiling. In addition, data breaches are a security risk, exposing personal data to cyberattacks. Last but not least, the retention of personal data can enable governments to conduct citizen surveillance to infringe on human rights.
Therefore, it is essential to establish robust privacy protection regulations. The right to privacy is stipulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the European Convention on Human Rights, and the European Charter of Fundamental Rights. However, the United States Constitution does not stipulate the right to privacy. This right is implied by the various amendments to the Constitution. To this day, it remains controversial if the Constitution does protect the right to privacy. This is because the right to privacy, as we currently refer to it, was not an issue when the Constitution was drafted. No amendment has been added to address the issue of privacy as a problem of the digital era.
The European Union is ahead of the United States in ensuring the right to privacy for its citizens and the consumer. Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is the world’s strictest privacy and security law (Wolf, 2022, n.a.). An equivalent to this European legislation does not exist in the US. Perhaps the most important additional laws and regulations needed now would be a robust federal data privacy law like GDPR. For now, some of the US regulations that pertain to privacy include the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), protecting the privacy and security of individuals’ health information, Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), protecting the privacy of children under the age of 13 online, and Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), addressing privacy protection in electronic communications (Klosowski, 2021, n.a.). At the state level, California is ahead in ensuring privacy protection for its citizens through the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), granting California residents certain rights regarding the collection, use, and disclosure of their personal information by businesses (Bonta, 2023, n.a.)
The privacy issue has become even more of a concern in the last few months as the public was granted access to large language models (LLMs) or generative chatbots, such as Open AI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard. GDPR directly affected Europe’s access to these LLMs, forcing chatbot owners to give in to the privacy demands of GDPR. Large language models depend on the information fed by users to train their AI algorithms and make better and more accurate predictions (Belanger, 2023, para. 3). Open AI was temporarily banned in Italy, while Google decided not to launch its LLM Bard in the European Union to avoid a confrontation with the GDPR regulations. This may be a good moment to reconsider the importance of privacy regulations in the US and produce legislation that strictly ensures privacy rights.
Bibliography
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Belanger, Ashley. “OpenAI Gives in to Italy’s Data Privacy Demands, Ending ChatGPT Ban.” Ars Technica, May 1, 2023. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/05/openai-gives-in-to-italys-data-privacy-demands-ending-chatgpt-ban/.
Bonta, Rob. “California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).” State of California – Department of Justice – Office of the Attorney General, May 10, 2023. https://oag.ca.gov/privacy/ccpa.
Fairclough, Bradyn. 2016. “Privacy Piracy: The Shortcomings of the United States’ Data Privacy Regime and How to Fix.” Journal of Corporation Law 42 (2): 461–80.
Klosowski, Thorin. “The State of Consumer Data Privacy Laws in the US (and Why It Matters).” The New York Times, September 6, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/blog/state-of-privacy-laws-in-us/.
Wolford, Ben. “What Is GDPR, the EU’s New Data Protection Law?” GDPR.eu, May 26, 2022. https://gdpr.eu/what-is-gdpr/.