A polite voice welcomes her and unlocks the door. Your first guest arrives, and the outdoor security camera on your porch captures her walking up to your home. I was previously the Information and Privacy Officer with the Ontario Information and Privacy Commissioner’s Office. My expertise is in data privacy, data governance and artificial intelligence. There is a dark side to these virtual assistants. Can Alexa or other personal digital assistants violate the privacy and security of our data? Possibly. Much of the data that these digital assistants collect and use include personal, potentially identifiable and possibly sensitive information.
Although we have come a long way in the design and execution of these AI technologies, there is still more work to be done in this arena. They observe and collect data in real-time and have the capability to pull information from different sources such as smart devices and cloud services and put the information into context using AI to make sense of the situation.
They have recently undergone massive transformation and run on operating systems that are fuelled by artificial intelligence (AI). Now, the future is here and this future is embedded, augmented and ubiquitous.ĭigital assistants can be found in your office, home, car, hotel, phone and many other places. A few short years ago, personal digital assistants like Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri and Google Assistant sounded futuristic.