Assessing behavioral data science privacy issues in government artificial intelligence deployment

Abstract

In today’s global culture where the Internet has established itself as the main tool for communication and commerce, the capability to massively analyze and predict citizens’ behavior has become a priority for governments in terms of collective intelligence and security. At the same time, in the context of novel possibilities that artificial intelligence (AI) brings to governments in terms of understanding and developing collective behavior analysis, important concerns related to citizens’ privacy have emerged. In order to identify the main uses that governments make of AI and to define citizens’ concerns about their privacy, in the present study, we undertook a systematic review of the literature, conducted in-depth interviews, and applied data-mining techniques. Based on our results, we classified and discussed the risks to citizens’ privacy according to the types of AI strategies used by governments that may affect collective behavior and cause massive behavior modification. Our results revealed 11 uses of AI strategies used by the government to improve their interaction with citizens, organizations in cities, services provided by public institutions or the economy, among other areas. In relation to citizens’ privacy when AI is used by governments, we identified 8 topics related to human behavior predictions, intelligence decision making, decision automation, digital surveillance, data privacy law and regulation, and the risk of behavior modification. The paper concludes with a discussion of the development of regulations focused on the ethical design of citizen data collection, where implications for governments are presented aimed at regulating security, ethics, and data privacy. Additionally, we propose a research agenda composed by 16 research questions to be investigated in further research.