17/03/2017.

The capacity of the regulatory toolkit, that will be made available next year by the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR), to regulate increasingly complex and opaque data processing operations such as big data, artificial intelligence and machine learning is covered in a new paper published by the Information Commissioner’s Office.

‘Big data, artificial intelligence, machine learning and data protection’ updates a paper published 30 months earlier on these three data processing operations.

1) Big data is becoming the norm for many organisations using it to profile people and inform their decision-making processes.

2) Artificial intelligence (AI) is providing the ‘thinking’ power behind virtual personal assistants and smart cars.

3) Machine learning algorithms are discovering patterns in data that traditional data analysis couldn’t hope to find, helping to detect fraud and diagnose diseases.

The ICO’s key conclusion is that while the processing of personal data is changing, the underlying issues remain the same – and ICO has been addressing them for many years.