The privacy threat that AI poses isn’t what it learns. It’s what it figures out
The privacy threat that AI poses isn’t what it learns. It’s what it figures out
Publish Date: 2026-04-20 06:00:00
Source Domain: www.theglobeandmail.com
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People attend an artificial intelligence conference in Montreal in September, 2023.Ryan Remiorz/The Canadian Press
Michael Geist holds the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa’s Faculty of Law.
In 1997, an MIT graduate student named Latanya Sweeney stunned the privacy world by matching publicly available voter rolls with hospital records stripped of names and addresses to identify the supposedly anonymous medical history of the then-governor of Massachusetts. Three years later, she expanded on that finding by demonstrating that 87 per cent of the U.S. population could be uniquely identified using just three data points: ZIP code, date of birth and gender.
Ms. Sweeney’s work shaped privacy frameworks worldwide, which responded with de-identification standards designed to manage the risk by removing obvious identifiers, applying statistical tests and treating the resulting data as safe to use. Indeed, a core tenet of modern privacy regulation rests on the premise that de-identified data can be used, disclosed and commercialized without compromising individual privacy.
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Artificial intelligence has broken that premise. AI systems equipped with real-time search capabilities and inferential power can now accomplish in minutes what once took skilled researchers days. A February study from ETH Zurich demonstrated that AI agents could match anonymized online accounts to real-world identities with up to 90-per-cent precision, replicating in minutes what would take a skilled human investigator hours. What Ms. Sweeney identified as a vulnerability is increasingly an operational reality for anyone with an internet connection and an AI chatbot.
This matters urgently for Canada. AI Minister Evan Solomon has promised an updated national AI strategy that features modernized privacy rules. While it may be tempting…
