Your AI May Be Ethical, But Is It Prudent?

Do you remember a story about an irate father who marched into a Target to complain that his teenage daughter received maternity coupons, only to find out a few days later that she was pregnant? The story came from a 2012 New York times article and it signaled the arrival of predictive analytics. Despite reasonable skepticism over whether the story was real, it helped initiate an ethical debate over consumer privacy that has only intensified. Today, we live in a world with more powerful predictive capabilities and more personal data to be leveraged. We've reached an era in which AI can do more than out a teenage pregnancy.