AI, Privacy, and Everyday Life

If you take a look at your smartphone right now, artificial intelligence is already running a huge portion of your daily routine. It controls your social media feeds, your music streaming recommendations, and your face recognition login. In terms of sheer convenience, it makes life incredibly seamless. It is nice that your phone can predict your text messages or curate a playlist that fits your exact mood.

How AI Uses Your Personal Data

But there is a very thin line between a helpful feature and something that feels invasive. Many people have had the experience of talking about a specific product out loud with friends, only to see an advertisement for that exact item on their social media feed a few minutes later. Tech companies insist that their devices are not literally recording your private conversations through the microphone. Instead, their predictive AI algorithms are just incredibly sophisticated at tracking your location, search history, and clicking habits (Veliz). They know what you want before you even realize it yourself.

The Balance Between Convenience and Privacy

Ultimately, living alongside AI is a major trade-off. It gives us incredible convenience and saves us time, but we are constantly trading away our personal data and privacy to get it. We probably cannot stop using these technologies entirely, but we need to be a lot more aware of how much power we are handing over to these algorithms.

Works Cited

Veliz, Carissa. Privacy Is Power: Why You Should Take Back Control of Your Data. Melville House, 2021.