How Al could impact privacy - The Hindu editorial page warning Monday is timely.
Problem: DPDP Act 2023 says personal data can be used for Al training under "legitimate use" without consent if publicly available. But Al models don't just memorize, they infer. Studies flagged models can identify individuals from blurred faces, infer political affiliation, caste from surname, location from shadow, even health from gait. Research shows 2024 Stanford model identified 85% of US voters from LinkedIn photos.
Read more - Al Models, Free But Not Free
In India, risk is higher. Aadhaar photos, voter rolls with photos and addresses, DigiYatra faces, CCTVs in Delhi that captured 1,200 kg firecracker seizure - all public or semi-public. Al can profile. EU's Al Act bans biometric identification in public, India's DPDP exempts government for national security
Editorial cites two gaps: One, DPDP allows "publicly available data" exemption but Al training on Instagram public posts scrapes minors' faces - Meta's Al trained on 5 years of Instagram data, including Indian users, with opt-out buried. Two, right to be forgotten is narrow - only if data fiduciary violates law, not if Al infers sensitive data.
For Indian perspective, need three fixes: Mandatory data protection impact assessment for Al models above 10 million users, as recommended by Justice Srikrishna Committee; ban on inference of sensitive attributes - religion, caste, sexual orientation - under Article 21; and requirement to publish training data sources.
Finance Minister's capex push includes 20 MW Al supercluster by Vultr in Chennai with 10,000 AMD GPUs - biggest AMD deployment in India - powering models. Without privacy guardrails, supercluster will super-profile.
Read more - Nvidia Chief Target Of China Spy Plot
Al should not know you are Dalit Christian praying in Bankura from your Facebook. That is privacy's last frontier.
Tags: #AI #Privacy #DPDPAct #DataProtection #Biometrics #FacialRecognition #Vultr #Chennai #MetaAl