‘Ambient Consent Collapse’ and ‘Right to be Forgotten’ - these are two fascinating concepts in the realm of AI that I learned about at Cisco Live EMEA from Annie Hardy. Annie contrasts the benefits and convenience of emerging technologies with the concerns of privacy in an ‘always on’ world. It is an intriguing dichotomy to say the least.

Transcript

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Hey everyone, we’re out here at Cisco Live in Amsterdam and I’ve been chatting with Annie a good bit and there were a couple of I guess concepts or names for some really interesting, alarming, fascinating um happenings and I’m don’t want to spoil the surprise, but can you give us the name of those and what they are? >> Yes. So, there were two that I wanted to share with y’all and with you. So, the first one is called the right to be forgotten. The right to be forgotten is the idea that uh machines are being trained on our information. Uh people are leveraging our information for personalization. Our personal personally identifiable information is around the internet and places and people are recognizing and supporting the idea that humans have a right to be forgotten. So the concept is called the right to be forgotten. is do humans have a right to be forgotten by systems that are monetizing their identity, their information? And if so, what does it look like to actually protect those people to remove that information? Do you have to pay for it? Who do you pay? Do we penalize the companies who are doing it? How do we hold what where’s accountability? And right now, we’re in Europe. So, what does it look like when you have someone who’s European who goes to the United States? in Europe maybe their data is more protected than the US but the US has their information and is it it so the right to be forgotten is complicated it’s not easy to understand or easy to deal with but it’s something that people are talking about the second is uh called ambient consent collapse so ambient consent collapse relates to spatial computing and spatial uh intelligence so what we have now is we have our earbuds we have our phones but we have our earbuds we have our smart watches we have glasses that are smart glasses. Uh, and of course we had our chat GPT pin, which we used to have. Nobody’s wearing that anymore. Uh, but the fact is that we are being recorded and monitored without our permission. And it’s something where historically if you didn’t want anyone listening to you, you just would not actually put an Alexa in your home. Uh, that’s not the case anymore. You can be in public and people can recognize who you are. They can uh record you with their glasses. They can do facial recognition to see who you are. They can find out information about you. um my watch. The other day I was having a conversation and I didn’t realize I’d hit the Gemini button and all of a sudden I’m having a conversation and the watch pops up and starts talking to me saying it sounds to me like you need to do XYZ like you want to create this is what you can do and it started writing out like an email >> because it heard what I was saying and it tried it started sketching something together and everybody around me was very uncomfortable. Um, another example would be we had a uh a partner and we had a couple of partners show to an event and one of the partners was wearing metagasses recording everything >> and the other part we had to tell them you can’t do that. >> You can’t because some people don’t find issue with it. So we are being recorded uh without our permission. Uh we are being I mean this is a very good slunk audience thing honestly like there is a lack of consent about how our identity is being reflected and where it has been captured. We do not necessarily have a right to be forgotten and those two concepts the right to be forgotten and ambient consent collapse are going to be things to continue to explore and follow in the news. So these are >> these are new topics to me that these terms are new topics. Um maybe not necessarily the concepts, but >> are you seeing maybe some future legislation on this or just like GDPR came to be and stuff like that? >> So what I’m going to say is I I I will see um BYOD policies at workplaces change. Um so the UK I can’t remember what entity in the UK, but they have a new clean desk policy where you cannot be you cannot bring AI augmented devices into work. You cannot have wearables, watches, phones, or not watches, not phones. Well, I mean phones are a problem, but watches, uh, earbuds or, uh, glasses. Um, you can’t bring those to the office anymore. Um, so you’re going to see some entities who are changing their clean desk policies on the ambient consent collapse. Um, another one is for the uh, right to be forgotten. I think also there’s going to be an elevation in Europe specifically of people who are recognizing the human right to be forgotten. So I would I would see that happening here. Honestly, anything that’s going to protect the user is probably going to happen in Europe first. >> No, these are fascinating [music] topics. I really do appreciate your time and your thoughts on that. >> Yeah, absolutely. You all should have the right to be forgotten. [music]