Microsoft and Google Want to Let Artificial Intelligence Loose on Our Most Private Data

The recent emergence of a powerful machine-learning technique known as deep learning has made computing giants such as Google, Facebook, and Microsoft even hungrier for data. It's what lets software learn to do things like recognize images or understand language. Yet many problems where deep learning could be most valuable involve data that is hard to come by or is held by organizations that are unwilling to share it. And as Apple CEO Tim Cook puts it, some consumers are already concerned about companies "gobbling up" their personal information. "A lot of people who hold sensitive data sets like medical images are just not going to share them for legal and regulatory concerns," says Vitaly Shmatikov, a professor at Cornell Tech who studies privacy.