Privacy, Artificial Intelligence and Congress

By U.S. Rep. Warren Davidson
R-Ohio's 8th District

As Artificial Intelligence (AI) continues to grow in both popularity and overall ability, Congress needs to act proactively — not reactively — to protect the American people by passing comprehensive frameworks to address concerns with AI. Recently named one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential Voices on AI, Pope Leo XIV recently expressed similar concerns and spoke of the need to “use these gifts [of technology] wisely, ensuring they serve the common good.” What’s more, a new poll from Pew Research shows that over 53% of Americans say AI is doing more to hurt than help people keep their personal information private.

Unfortunately, Congress hasn’t taken AI regulatory issues seriously — including the privacy implications.  Many of the worst risks with AI don’t come from the technology alone but from the absence of strong privacy safeguards. Without clear limits on how data is collected, stored, and shared, AI becomes a powerful tool for exploitation and surveillance. That’s why any serious conversation about Artificial Intelligence begins with privacy.

Privacy forms the base layer for ethical Artificial Intelligence. How do you safeguard your own data? Who is liable if your data is compromised, especially by AI? Does simply entering a query into a search engine or engaging in dialogue with AI void a reasonable expectation of privacy? Can the company then claim that data as its own? Can that search or query be made public? Sold and monetized?  When, if ever, should law enforcement require a warrant or subpoena?

These are important questions that Congress must answer, and if Congress is unable to answer them, then state governments may have to take the lead for now. In the meantime, surveillance capitalism and government spying on its own citizens has run amok. At the intersection, Palantir has been commissioned to develop an AI tool to unify the data in every federal database, turning it into useful, easily accessible information.

The Patriot Act massively expanded domestic surveillance. The Bank Secrecy Act ended any claim to privacy in your financial dealings. Most Bureaus of Motor Vehicles monetize the data that citizens are required to provide to drive or obtain a Real ID. Now the government is buying data that would otherwise require a warrant or subpoena — circumventing the Fourth Amendment.

While the original House version of the Big Beautiful Bill included a 10-year moratorium on state or local regulation of AI, the Senate wisely voted 99-1 to remove this provision. The Senate’s removal of the AI provision influenced my decision to support the final passage of the bill. Thankfully, stripping the AI regulatory exemption from the Big Beautiful Bill offers hope of accountability.

Freedom surrendered is rarely reclaimed. Congress may decide to keep things the way they are now with respect to privacy, but they shouldn’t. The Fourth Amendment doesn’t say, “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.” Instead, it says the government requires probable cause and a warrant or subpoena to obtain even limited ability to search or seize your property or information. We desperately need to restore a government small enough to fit within the Constitution.

In 2003, the movie iRobot laid out three laws designed in a fictitious future (2035) to safeguard human interaction with their Artificial Intelligence (AI)-controlled robots.

• A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

• A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders conflict with the First Law.

• A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

With respect to commerce, privacy resolves the fundamental issue of who owns what data. With that resolved, Artificial Intelligence remains challenging. iRobot wasn’t far off the mark — the First Law says no human should come to harm. Today, we lack even that baseline for AI. Perhaps we should add a few rules to that list, but we must define the parameters because the real-world consequences are already upon us.

Hollywood imagined rules in 2003 to keep humans safe from AI. Yet, over two decades later, Congress still has not written any rules to do the same. Even worse, many of my colleagues seem entirely unconcerned with the potential repercussions that could soon become reality. Failure to act is its own decision, but AI is moving far faster than Congress and momentum in the wrong direction makes change harder as time passes.  If we don’t act swiftly, our current understanding of what “privacy” means could become a relic.

Warren Davidson represents Ohio's 8th Congressional District.