In our last issue, I wrote about smart cities and the growing debate over who owns the enormous amount of information they collect. This debate might help explain why a strange technology race is taking shape today. Companies, governments and researchers are scrambling to build tools capable of protecting sensitive information in a world where AI can infer information we never intentionally shared in the first place. This new privacy market is set to become a massive business. And could also become one of the most important technology battlegrounds of the next decade. It’s Complicated… More than a decade ago, Target figured out a teenage girl was pregnant before her father did. The retailer’s analytics systems noticed changes in her shopping habits and began sending coupons for baby products to the family’s home. Her father reportedly stormed into a Target store demanding answers, only to later discover the prediction had been correct. At the time, that story seemed shocking. But today it almost feels primitive. Because Target made that prediction using relatively basic data analysis compared with the much more advanced AI systems being built today. The entire online privacy economy was built around the simple idea of trying to protect information you knowingly handed over. Companies collected your data, but you decided whether to share it. And cybersecurity firms tried to keep it from leaking or getting stolen. But AI is changing the definition of privacy. Back in 2013, researchers from Cambridge and Microsoft demonstrated that Facebook Likes could accurately predict highly personal traits including political views, personality characteristics and sexual orientation. That study used data from just 58,000 volunteers. Now imagine what modern AI systems can do with much larger pools of information coming from smartphones, wearables, connected cars, smart homes and intelligent infrastructure. AI can even use