Article by Norman Sadeh: “Artificial intelligence (AI), especially the new generation of increasingly autonomous, agentic AI systems, has triggered understandable concerns about privacy. These systems can read our email messages, draft our documents, navigate our calendars, answer our questions, and even act on our behalf. They observe, analyze, and infer, often continuously. They can derive sensitive attributes from our digital traces and, with growing autonomy, sometimes initiate actions based on these inferences. Many of the privacy fears surrounding AI are real. But as paradoxical as it may seem, AI, including agentic AI, is also becoming essential to protecting privacy.
This column argues that without AI, adequate privacy has become simply out of reach. This is not because AI is benign; it most definitely is not. Rather, the modern digital ecosystem has evolved to a point where no human, unaided, can understand, monitor, or manage the complexity of today’s data practices. For two decades, my collaborators and I have studied why people struggle to manage their privacy and why this struggle keeps getting worse despite decades of regulation, policy work, and advances in privacy enhancing technologies. From mobile applications and IoT devices to location-sharing, video analytics, websites, and AI chatbots, we have found the same underlying truth: privacy is too dynamic, too contextual, and too cognitively demanding for people to manage manually. When it comes to managing privacy, AI is not merely helpful. It is indispensable…(More)”.
