Artificial intelligence algorithms need large quantities of data. The techniques utilized to obtain this information have raised issues about privacy, surveillance and copyright.

AI-powered devices and services, such as virtual assistants and IoT products, continuously collect individual details, raising concerns about intrusive data gathering and unapproved gain access to by 3rd celebrations. The loss of privacy is more intensified by AI's capability to process and integrate vast quantities of information, potentially resulting in a monitoring society where private activities are constantly kept an eye on and evaluated without adequate safeguards or openness.

Sensitive user information gathered might consist of online activity records, information, video, or audio. [204] For instance, in order to develop speech recognition algorithms, Amazon has tape-recorded millions of personal conversations and allowed short-term employees to listen to and transcribe a few of them. [205] Opinions about this extensive surveillance range from those who see it as a needed evil to those for whom it is plainly dishonest and a violation of the right to personal privacy. [206]
AI developers argue that this is the only way to provide important applications and have established several strategies that attempt to maintain personal privacy while still obtaining the data, such as data aggregation, de-identification and differential personal privacy. [207] Since 2016, some privacy specialists, such as Cynthia Dwork, have actually begun to view privacy in terms of fairness. Brian Christian wrote that professionals have rotated "from the question of 'what they understand' to the question of 'what they're doing with it'." [208]
Generative AI is frequently trained on unlicensed copyrighted works, including in domains such as images or computer code