AI companions are coming. Privacy rules are not ready

https://www.straitstimes.com/opinion/ai-companions-are-coming-privacy-rules-are-not-ready

Publish Date: 2026-06-08 17:00:00

In Magnifica Humanitas, his first encyclical, Pope Leo XIV frames artificial intelligence as more than a technological challenge: AI calls into question the value and worth of the human person. The parallel with Rerum Novarum, Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 response to the Industrial Revolution, is deliberate. Then, the Church confronted a world in which labour and capital were being remade by machines that threatened to turn workers into means rather than ends.

Today, the question is whether human beings will continue to be understood as persons rather than profiles.

This concern may sound abstract or theological, but it is increasingly a question for regulators, with privacy and data protection as the first line of defence.

Data protection law has long asked a familiar set of questions. What personal data is collected? Was consent obtained? Is the data accurate? How long is it retained? With whom is it shared?

Those questions remain important. But they are no longer enough.

In the early days of the internet, search engines helped find what we were looking for. Then social media platforms began to infer whom we knew and what would keep us engaged. Now chatbots are learning what we need, how we seek it, and increasingly what we are worried about. In the very near future, AI companions will know what we feel, what we fear, whom we trust – and how we might be persuaded.

We are moving from information retrieval to relationship-mediated computing. The privacy question is therefore more than what data is collected. It is also what kind of relationship is being simulated.

Conversation invites disclosure. The reason chatbots refer to themselves as “I” is not because that is the best way to share information with us. It’s the best way to keep us sharing information with them.

We type things into a chatbot that we might never put into a search bar, something Google is betting on with the biggest changes to search this century. For many, these systems do not even feel like…

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