AI Systems Spark Privacy, Security Concerns

(MENAFN) Artificial intelligence systems are triggering immediate concerns about privacy and national security, owing to their capacity to analyze, categorize, and profile sensitive user information, a senior data science engineer warned, highlighting significant gaps in transparency and regulation.

While AI tools like chatbots are celebrated for streamlining everyday tasks, their use of personal data to tailor responses — including potential profiling based on political affiliations, religious beliefs, or health status — has ignited debate over breaches of data protection laws and the ethical deployment of autonomous technology.

Recent investigations suggest platforms such as ChatGPT can identify and classify users' characteristics through interactions, including politically and religiously sensitive markers. Developers, including OpenAI, maintain that users can opt out of data being used for training and assert that robust administrative and technical protections are implemented.

Yet Emre Durgut, a senior data science engineer based in Türkiye, told media that the current framework is excessively opaque.

“AI systems have technical, legal, and social responsibilities,” he said. “The biggest risk right now is that the personal data of users can be utilized to create profiles — these profiles may contain sensitive personal info, such as political views, religious beliefs, and the health of a person.”

“If this data is processed without the user’s consent or in violation of the law, that would raise some serious privacy concerns,” he said.

Durgut emphasized that such practices could violate data protection regulations, including the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and Türkiye’s Personal Data Protection Law (KVKK), both of which mandate informed consent, transparency, and restrictions on sensitive data usage.

“These regulations are based on the principles of explicitly giving consent, data minimization, purpose limitation, and transparency,” he said. “If these ‘hidden’ profiles are created with sensitive labels, this constitutes a clear violation of the law.”

MENAFN13072025000045017169ID1109793534