Hong Kong privacy watchdog signs global guiding statement amid AI data scraping concerns
‘Global data protection authorities will all agree that [platforms] should give users options to opt in or out of data collection,’ commissioner Ada Chung says
A Hong Kong watchdog and 15 international data protection authorities have signed a joint statement setting out privacy measures, amid concerns that social media platforms are extracting user information for artificial intelligence (AI) training purposes.
Privacy Commissioner Ada Chung Lai-ling said on Saturday the AI development came along with a large-scale data collection of social media users who were unaware that their personal information had been scraped and shared with external companies to build data sets.
Chung said the practice – some were carried out legally and some not – had become a global issue that other data privacy authorities, including in the United Kingdom, Canada, Mexico and Spain, were concerned about.
Hong Kong’s Privacy Commissioner for Personal Data was among the 16 authorities which signed on Tuesday a joint statement setting out global privacy protection measures that organisations were expected to follow.
Those included ensuring the data was extracted legally for the use of commercial or socially beneficial purposes and having more control to detect unauthorised scraping.
