Can we protect our data in the artificial intelligence era?

Donald Trump has won the United States presidency and Brexit has promised to take the United Kingdom out of the European Union. Both campaigns employ Cambridge Analytica, who harvest the data of millions of Facebook users to personalise electoral messaging and sway their voting intentions. Millions of people begin to ask themselves whether, in the digital era, they have lost something that they valued dearly: their privacy. Two years later, millions of email inboxes in Europe would be filling up with messages from companies, asking them for permission to continue processing their data, complying with the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Despite its imperfections, this law has served as a point of reference for laws in Brazil and Japan and began the era of data protection in earnest. Nevertheless, what was once seen as a triumph for privacy is now seen as a roadblock in Europe's quest to develop digital technologies, especially artificial intelligence.