Artificial Intelligence - Personal data you give away when you shop

Every single time you use your loyalty card at the check-out, use free Wi-Fi at an airport or shopping centre or put orders in place via an app, you hand over a huge amount of valuable personal data. You agreed to do so when you clicked 'accept' on the terms and conditions at the point of sign-up or login. Consumer data is used to personalise experiences and cut through the clutter of information, giving you more of what they think you want and less of what you don't.

More experts are increasingly concerned about how personal and sensitive data will be used in the future. For example, health insurers could one day set premiums based on predictions about your future wellbeing, employers could determine your productivity and loyalty, and banks might approve or reject your mortgage application using computer-generated analysis.

Artificial intelligence and algorithms might one day control us based on the data we freely give over now and we should be aware of it. Companies are drowning in information and collecting a lot of it. All of them know that data is important and they all have put in place a strategy to collect it as a top priority. With all that data, personalised, one-to-one experiences can be established in a way that hasn’t existed before.

Data usage is more and more used by artificial intelligence to figure out what you might buy in the future. Spotify is recommending new music based on your previous consumption habits in a calculation that's not just serving you more of what you like now, but what you could like. Rewards in exchange for their data are provided to users, e.g. free Wi-Fi at the airport, points on shopping, special discounts and the like. A US tech company has produced a device that connects to a smartphone and allows people with heart conditions to conduct a free at-home electrocardiography test. The data you're giving them is much more valuable and powerful than what you are paying for the service. In the future, they can make predictions about heart attacks and strokes.

People should not take it for granted and keep asking questions such as why do they want that kind of data? What might they do with it in the future? Private health insurers in Australia have been lobbying the Federal Government to overturn a ban on them accessing data from the controversial My Health Record. They argue it would be anonymous and used for research and statistical analysis, which may very well be the case — for now.

At a recent technology conference, ANZ revealed it was testing the use of artificial intelligence to assess a potential borrower's risk profile. The company IBM has also started using a system dubbed Watson that predicts future performance based on data and computerised analysis.