As the report goes, it says that AI could lead to better public safety and security. In my opinion, it might be true that AI improves public safety, but personal security and privacy would be the problem. AIs highly depends on data, thus some of the AIs have good excuses to ask us to sacrifice our privacy. The example the report uses is surveillance cameras, which AI could use those videos to detect possible crime. One could argue that surveillance only exist in public spaces, so it is a acceptable sacrifice to gain public security. However, some of the AIs we use are so called personal assistant. They exist in our mobile phones and personal computers, record our location, searching history, frequent contacts, and even our daily schedules, manage our emails. All these information are uploaded to the cloud, which means they are not safe. The information about everyone could be requested by the government to watching over peoples, or hacked by hackers that seeks the value of these information. In fact, this problem is not a new problem. There are lots of company who have security issues in their database, thus leaking their sensitive user information. As we go through the internet security history, we can see there is no completely safe. Furthermore, this time the information is more sensitive, numerous and dense. Using those AI requires sensitive information in a long time, and they are all uploaded to the same place, holding by same people. In this way, the security problem is more critical that it ever does.
The problems listed above are just about security, while there is a more important problem: people do not have enough understanding on the value of their information. Information nowadays are valuable personal properties. As the amout of information goes up, the value of the information may go up exponentially. The essence here is that, those personal AI may seem to be free, but in fact people are selling their personal information to the companies in exchange for the service. This again, is not a new problem. The internet content providers has used such free strategy for a long time. For example, F2P, free to play games, usually contains in-game purchases. Besides those players spends money, the existence of free players are also meaningful to those game producers. Usually without the free players, there are no meaning for the payed players to pay their money. The same logic can also apply to online forums and other content providers. They do not charge users for skimming or producing contents on the websites, but the flow of views to the website could turn into commercial values. Free users might be kind of resources to the content providers, but all they have spent is only time, and they do have the choice to not spend any more time on the game or forums. For AIs, people are not aware of how much value their information have, and they sold them to the big companies as easily as they sold their time to those online services before.
