What is the future of privacy: VPN’s vs Artificial Intelligence?
Machine learning, the bases of Artificial intelligence dates back to 1300 AD. This slowly evolved and is now so common that we come across Artificial intelligence every day in our lives.
I bet that nobody had privacy concerns back in 1300 AD or even in the 19th century but Artificial Intelligence is not the same now.
The basic principle of Artificial intelligence is learning, sensing its surrounding, and adapting to it. So Artificial Intelligence gathers all the data and stores it, this may include your healthcare information, your location, your likes or dislikes, this is just to name a few.
Why can Artificial Intelligence prove to be dangerous?
To understand this better let’s look at an example of the most sort after gadget for our home; The Google Home and Amazon Echo.
Yes, everyone wants one these in their house for doing things like playing music, adding reminders, creating a shopping list, and even shopping online and much more with just your voice. But did you know that all your voice commands are stored on Google or Amazon servers and used for improving their service?
This is just the tip of the iceberg. Artificial intelligence is being used everywhere, from Artificial Intelligence dashcam to look for fugitives in passing cars to being a customer support representative. This means a big amount of data is mined, stored and used. As data needs to be interpreted and used, they are not even encrypted
Edward Snowden has proved that you can’t even trust your own government with your privacy. Something or the other comes up most of the time that shows how your data is being misused.
“As of now hackers can easily reverse-engineer data or the Artificial Intelligence algorithm out of the machine learning models very easily” – said one of the research and associate professor at Cornell Tech.
To understand this better, consider asking someone about what will be a good choice to eat, you send them pictures and they reply with the one that is good. This is how normally paid Artificial Intelligence service from Google or Microsoft would work.
Now send thousands of pictures of food and ask what should you eat. Let’s hope that they reply, and you would have a clear idea of what their choice is or how do they think in terms of food. This is exactly what reverse attack is. A hacker will send hundreds of request to understand how the algorithm works. The more complex the algorithm, the more difficult it is to crack and is limited to some paraments as these requests sent are charged.
Once a hacker steals an algorithm, they will also have access to the data used to train it.
Conclusion:
We would definitely benefit from the use of artificial intelligence, there is no doubt about it but the question here is at what cost. Any technology will have its pros and cons and it’s up to the company who are developing it to mitigate the risk if at all they cannot be removed completely.
Privacy is and will always be a substantial concern and you should ask yourself is it worth having the comfort of these technologies at the cost of your private data and what are you doing to keep your personal information to yourself.
