Farm data privacy: who owns it once AI gets involved?
Farm data privacy: who owns it once AI gets involved?
https://farmtario.com/markets-business/business/farm-data-privacy-ai-agreements/
Publish Date: 2026-06-15 06:13:00
Source Domain: farmtario.com
Privacy and ownership of farm data in artificial intelligence can be complicated, especially when data agreements are involved.
AI systems gain trust with input and participation from producers, but experts say the details around data use and privacy can still be hazy, largely due to unclear data agreements and privacy rules.
Why It Matters
As AI systems become more common in precision agriculture, it will be necessary to understand data ownership through regulations and privacy agreements.
What do we mean by privacy?
The rules AI systems operate under can be vague, sometimes uncomfortably so, says Rozita Dara, a professor of data strategy at the University of Guelph.
“Some farmers, because they have so many years of experience and they’re used to making decisions based on their experience or what they have learned, they don’t like this black box approach,” she said.
Dara’s research includes precision agriculture, data governance and machine learning.
She said she has heard many producers express concerns about farm data becoming compromised. What complicates the issue of privacy is that farm data is generally categorized as business data, which is treated differently than personal data.
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“Privacy is all about personal data and compromising individual’s privacy,” Dara said. “And when we say compromising, it could be reputation laws, it could be financial loss, it could be something that negatively has impacted their job, their health, their family members.”
“In the context of agriculture, (that) regulation doesn’t apply,” she said. “In the context of farming, it’s slightly different, because the personal data that’s collected in the context of farming, it’s more of a business data.”
The problem with data agreements
Dara recommended producers pay close attention to data agreements, which she…
