A few years ago, I wrote about the myth of privacy and the true cost of convenience in the digital age. Quite a lot has changed since then. In the last post, the premise was simple: the price we pay for modern-day conveniences is privacy. In other words, you can have true privacy or convenience, but not both.

Two months after that post, OpenAI released the very first version of ChatGPT. It’s been AI-mania since then.

The rapid adoption of AI products and services since September 2022 has been nothing short of phenomenal. Many have stated this is the biggest technological breakthrough we’ve seen since the internet itself.

Now, AI has been in existence for over seven decades. Over these 70 years of existence, various companies and governments have leveraged AI to solve problems, create products and services. Long before the likes of ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude. I’ve been fascinated with the trajectory of AI as I’ve studied it over the past 9 years, but 2022 changed the game.

As I mentioned, AI has been in existence for decades, but not everyone had utility access prior to 2022. It sure wasn’t as ubiquitous as it is now. You can now work with AI on a very wide variety of tasks and projects. Everything from image editing and medical assistance to videography, research, and data analysis. It’s all a prompt away.

Now, besides the monthly costs of some of these tools, I raise the same question as in my last post: What’s the cost? The answer is the same: Privacy.

It’s very important to understand and accept the myth of privacy in the age we live in. What I mean by this is, information about your personal life, which you may want hidden, may actually not be hidden; worst of all, no one is hacking you. You’re revealing this information yourself, not because you want to, but because you have to, to access the conveniences you enjoy. Let’s look at a few examples.

I currently wear a fitness tracker (and maybe you do too) that tracks my sleep, my activity levels, strain on my body, and a whole bunch of data. I love it. It gets into detail and even tells me how fast or slow I’m ageing. Now, these are all very interesting data points, but guess what? I don’t own it. The company does. All that data about me and my health was willingly given up in order to access insights about my health. Now, if I wanted true privacy and didn’t want my health data out there in a server somewhere, I could just NOT wear the device, but I like it, and I want to. Ergo, the privacy-convenience paradox.

Another example: say I wanted to get some professional headshots, maybe for a company website, LinkedIn, or other media use; in the past, I’d have had to go to a studio or get a photographer to do this for me. Now? I just upload some of my photos to an app, and I get headshots in seconds. You’ve probably done this, but you’ve probably not seen any notices about where these images are stored or how they are used. Now, think about it; you can save money, and most importantly, time, by using these tools, even for free, but you have to willingly breach any privacy concerns you have. The same goes for any sensitive information being uploaded to these amazing AI tools. You can use AI to track your diet and have detailed plans submitted to you every week or every month with valuable insights on what to do and how to do it, but you have to log your daily food and beverage intake to the model. You need to reveal your eating habits for the AI model to work perfectly. You’re paying for these conveniences. Not $20/month, but with your personal data. It’s inevitable. You can also have AI track your spending and give you advice on how to better manage your money and meet your financial goals, but you’ll need to share your spending data with the tool as well, but hey, this isn’t a big deal. You already do this with your bank and/or credit card company. AI just gives you better insights.

People are uploading personal pictures, company documents, health data, family information, and much more into AI tools every day, for the purpose of simplifying their lives and solving problems they have, and the inevitable cost of these conveniences is the unavoidable submission of these data points.

What’s the point of this post? Lol Same as the last; to highlight the true cost of these conveniences. Too many people believe there is such a thing as “privacy”, when in fact, by their actions, they’re willingly breaching their own privacy. My point is this: know the cost and accept it.

To be fair, all this didn’t emerge with AI. Spending data is one of the most revealing data points about an individual, and credit card companies have had these data points for decades. So have social media networks.

Something has to give. You can’t enjoy steak and wagyu burgers, then turn around to protest against the killing of animals. The two can’t coexist. In the same vein, you can’t truly believe privacy exists and yet give up sensitive information for the convenience they provide.

As I’ve said, this isn’t to raise an alarm or scare you. It’s simply to highlight the hidden costs of modern-day conveniences.

Perhaps we exercise a bit more caution as we use these tools, but I doubt we will. The truth of the matter is this: the more we pay (in data), the more we get; and we want more.

Selah.