"Let’s not forget that the industry building AI Assistants has already made billions of dollars honing the targeted advertising business model. They built their empires by drawing our attention, collecting our data, inferring our interests, and selling access to us.
AI Assistants supercharge this problem. First because they access and process incredibly intimate information, and second because the computing power they require to handle certain tasks is likely too immense for a personal device. This means that very personal data, including data about other people that exists on your phone, might leave your device to be processed on their servers. This opens the door to reuse and misuse. If you want your Assistant to work seemlessly for you across all your devices, then it’s also likely companies will solve that issue by offering cloud-enabled synchronisation, or more likely, cloud processing.
Once data has left your device, it’s incredibly hard to get companies to be clear about where it ends up and what it will be used for. The companies may use your data to train their systems, and could allow their staff and ‘trusted service providers’ to access your data for reasons like to improve model performance. It’s unlikely what you had all of this in mind when you asked your Assistant a simple question.
This is why it’s so important that we demand that our data be processed on our devices as much as possible, and used only for limited and specific purposes we are aware of, and have consented to. Companies must be provide clear and continuous information about where queries are processed (locally or in the cloud) and what data has been shared for that to happen, and what will happen to that data next."
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