The Conversation: “Digital assistants can be found in your office, home, car, hotel, phone and many other places. They have recently undergone massive transformation and run on operating systems that are fuelled by artificial intelligence (AI). They observe and collect data in real-time and have the capability to pull information from different sources such as smart devices and cloud services and put the information into context using AI to make sense of the situation. Although we have come a long way in the design and execution of these AI technologies, there is still more work to be done in this arena.

Much of the data that these digital assistants collect and use include personal, potentially identifiable and possibly sensitive information. Can Alexa or other personal digital assistants violate the privacy and security of our data? Possibly. There is a dark side to these virtual assistants…”