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Listen to the audio version of Luke Perlot’s “American Thinker” article. 4.5 Mins.
American Thinker has published an op-ed written by NLPC’s Luke Perlot highlighting the need for big tech companies to be accountable for data protection practices in developing their artificial intelligence programs. NLPC has filed shareholder proposals at Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Meta, and Alphabet addressing their poor privacy protection track records. From Perlot’s commentary:
A.I. systems require massive amounts of training data, and Big Tech pulls from sources it shouldn’t — scraping personal information, copyrighted works, and proprietary business data, often without consent.
Microsoft, for example, has deeply integrated OpenAI into its operations. OpenAI has been accused of illicitly collecting private conversations, medical data, and copyrighted material to train its models. The New York Times has sued both Microsoft and OpenAI for models allegedly built on stolen content. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s controversial “Recall” feature, which records everything a user sees or does on his device, is an alarming breach of privacy….
…Regulators worldwide are cracking down on A.I.-generated content, consumer awareness of data privacy is growing, and shareholders are recognizing the financial and legal liabilities resulting from of unchecked A.I. expansion. Further, with the new administration’s embrace of Elon Musk and other libertarian-influenced “techno-optimists” — who fervently support open-source A.I. development and oppose Big Brother–style data collection — we believe that privacy will be a core focus of A.I. policy moving forward.
Consumers have made clear that they are frustrated with the lack of options that the major technologies have given them to protect their data. McKinsey & Company argued in 2020 that companies that prioritize data privacy will build a competitive advantage over their competitors that do not. Five years later, none of the major players has staked out a competitive advantage in data privacy. In the rapidly expanding and potentially transformative A.I. industry, small changes in market share could be worth tens of billions to the companies involved.
Read Luke Perlot’s full commentary at American Thinker here.
