Dusseldorf Whether when shopping online, doing research or communicating with friends: Internet users leave vast amounts of data everywhere on the Internet. Tech companies analyze this data with the help of artificial intelligence (AI) in order to better understand their customers, to optimize their offers or to provide them with tailored advertising. And the more data these corporations have, the better they understand their customers.
That has to change, at least thinks the computer scientist Katharina Zweig from the Technical University of Kaiserslautern. In the Handelsblatt Disrupt podcast, she calls for a radical step in an interview with Handelsblatt editor-in-chief Sebastian Matthes: Tech companies should no longer be able to save their users’ data and use it as they wish.
Instead, Facebook, Amazon and Google will in future store their users’ data on special, company-independent platforms, so-called “data trust centers”. The users, in turn, allow the tech companies to analyze and process their data.
If corporations such as Facebook, Amazon and Google want to use the data for product recommendations, for example, the owners have to agree. “The AI just comes by and learns from the data,” says Zweig. The owners could change or withdraw their consent at any time.
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“Monopolies are broken up”
According to Zweig, this is a real “democratization of data”. This not only gives users back control over their data. According to Zweig, these independent data collection points would also drive innovations; users could also give smaller companies access to their data – for example, smaller online shops that have previously known little about their shopping behavior. This would “break up the monopolies of tech companies and create new business models,” says Zweig.
According to Zweig, this form of data democratization also has the potential to revolutionize education and medicine: If AI creates new teaching methods for children with the help of anonymized data or better treatment options through medical studies, it will be a great benefit. Zweig calls for a European research fund to finance these new data collection points.
In addition to personal data, Zweig also deals with the use of industrial data. These are especially available in large numbers in the industrialized country of Germany. Now they have to be used – in factories, for example, to accelerate production processes and detect errors at an early stage.
However, Zweig does not have the often expressed concern that AI will destroy millions of jobs. If new technologies were developed that use more AI, the production costs and therefore the price would decrease. This could create more expensive products that would require more jobs to manufacture. “Because visible human handwork is worth money and a status symbol.”
For 20 years, Zweig has been providing information on the ethical, political and social implications of AI in books and articles and as an advisor to ministries and commissions. She is also a member of the Handelsblatt editorial board.
Do you have any questions, criticism or suggestions? Then join our Handelsblatt Disrupt LinkedIn group and write.
More: The previous episode of Handelsblatt Disrupt can be found here.