ECA Compass

Welcome to the ECA News Compass!

This page is dedicated to everything that is going on in digital ethics, trust, AI, legal enforcement and regulation, ecommerce and technology.?

We recommend weekly news and headlines from a broad range of topics at the intersection of AI and society, technology, law & regulation, business and online retail.

4 - 8 December

Topic 1: AI

Data Transparency and Data Auditing in AI: The challenge of clean and coherent, yet diverse data sets

One of the major challenges with making AI safer and fairer is the data that it is trained on, because often, the data is poorly documented, stemming from intransparent sources with little or no rules to govern its usage.?

The resulting legal and ethical challenges are manifold, leaving developers, scholars, and policy makers with incoherence and often even lacking a common terminology to begin with.?

The Data Provenance Explorer is set out to tackle these issues as a multidisciplinary initiative to audit a vast amount of AI datasets.?

More on this topic:

Big Companies Find a Way to Identify A.I. Data They Can Trust

A consortium of companies, including major players like American Express, IBM, and Walmart, has developed new data provenance standards aimed at addressing the lack of clarity surrounding the data used in artificial intelligence (AI) systems. These standards essentially act as a labelling system, detailing where, when, and how data was collected, its intended use, and any restrictions.

The initiative stems from concerns about the reliability and transparency of data, which is crucial for building trustworthy AI models. By providing a structured framework for data documentation, the alliance hopes to increase corporate confidence in AI technology.

AI & Business

Machine Customers Will Decide Who Gets Their Trillion-Dollar Business. Is It You?

Machine customers represent the biggest new growth opportunity of the decade, but they don’t make decisions the way humans do. As more increasingly smart devices are connected to the internet and more people use intelligent virtual assistants such as Siri and Cortana, the commercial possibilities are staggering. Trillions of dollars will progressively slide into the hands — or should we say processors — of nonhumans.

AI & Policy

Agreement unveiled to make AI “secure by design”

18 countries have signed non-binding agreement on how to keep AI safe by implementing systems that offer “security by design”

The agreement is non-binding and contain general recommendations of monitoring AI systems for abuse and consumer data protection, as well as prevention of hacker attacks an other recommendations. It does not contain any guidelines an the use of AI or how models are being trained and how to ask for consent for using datasets for training.

AI & Ethics

AI doesn’t cause harm by itself, we should worry about the people who control it

The turmoil reflected many of the contradictions at the heart of the tech industry. The contradiction between the self-serving myth of tech entrepreneurs as rebel “disruptors”, and their control of a multibillion-dollar monster of an industry through which they shape all our lives. The tension, too, between the view of AI as a mechanism for transforming human life and the fear that it may be an existential threat to humanity.

Margaret Mitchell: ‘The people who are most likely to be harmed by AI don’t have a seat at the table for regulation’

Topic 2: Digital Business and Legal

Meta faces GDPR complaint over processing personal data without 'free consent”.

The privacy group, Noyb, filed a complaint with the Austrian Data Protection Authority, claiming that Meta is in breach of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) by giving users the choice to either consent to be tracked for personalised advertising or paying up to €250 a year to “preserve their data protection rights”.

According to the complaint, the average person has 35 apps installed on their smartphone. If all of these apps followed Meta’s lead and charged a similar fee, people would have to pay an annual fee of more than €8,000 to ensure their “fundamental rights” of privacy.