Artificial intelligence algorithms need large amounts of information. The strategies used to obtain this data have raised issues about personal privacy, surveillance and copyright.

AI-powered devices and services, such as virtual assistants and IoT products, continuously collect personal details, raising concerns about intrusive information event and unapproved gain access to by 3rd parties. The loss of privacy is more intensified by AI's capability to procedure and combine vast amounts of information, possibly resulting in a surveillance society where specific activities are continuously kept track of and evaluated without adequate safeguards or transparency.

Sensitive user information collected may include online activity records, geolocation information, video, or audio. [204] For example, in order to construct speech acknowledgment algorithms, Amazon has actually recorded millions of private conversations and permitted short-lived employees to listen to and transcribe some 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 an infraction of the right to personal privacy. [206]
AI developers argue that this is the only method to provide important applications and have developed numerous techniques that try to maintain personal privacy while still obtaining the information, such as information aggregation, de-identification and differential privacy. [207] Since 2016, some privacy professionals, such as Cynthia Dwork, have actually begun to view personal privacy in regards to fairness. Brian Christian wrote that experts have pivoted "from the concern of 'what they know' to the concern of 'what they're making with it'." [208]
Generative AI is often trained on unlicensed copyrighted works, including in domains such as images or computer system code