GDPR and Other Regulations Demand Explainable AI

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a wide-ranging and complex regulation intended to strengthen and unify data protection for all individuals within the European Union (EU). A year ago I blogged about the data governance ramifications of GDPR, and in this blog I'll focus on another facet of GDPR to talk about a related analytics topic: explainable artificial intelligence (AI). First, let's start with GDPR. Article 22 of GDPR, "Automated individual decision-making, including profiling," concerns the use of data in decision-making that affects individuals, such as a person applying for a loan. The data subject shall have the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing, including profiling, which produces legal effects concerning him or her or similarly significantly affects him or her." Point 2 of Article 22 describes exclusions (including situations involving the person's explicit consent, such as applying for a loan), but the key issue for our discussion here is in point 3: "…the data controller shall implement suitable measures to safeguard the data subject's rights and freedoms and legitimate interests, at least the right to obtain human intervention on the part of the controller, to express his or her point of view and to contest the decision."