The annual Data Privacy Day 2024 was earlier this week on Sunday, January 28th. I originally thought that the data privacy people worked with the people at Hallmark to help make a Data Privacy Day. In any event, I didn’t receive a card in the mail to commemorate Data Privacy Day!

Of course, as we move to an AI-powered world that is heavily reliant on massive amounts of data to help train AI algorithms that are the backbone for AI solutions, data protection has become even more important.

With the proliferation of AI solutions available in the marketplace, this means that you have to take the time to conduct the necessary due diligence on an AI provider to make sure it can earn your trust – and especially to clearly understand how your data will be protected by the provider.

So, when you are working with AI providers, it is more important to pay attention to the contract terms that apply to their use of your data, including whether it is used to train models, whether it can be commingled with data from other customers, and the level of privacy and security that will apply to its storage.

For example, the graphic above from the article referenced in the following sentence highlights some of the key data privacy features of Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 AI solution that was made generally available to the marketplace this past November – and which I use every day to save time and be more productive. In addition, more data privacy and data security information about Microsoft Copilot is contained in this article.

It’s also important to keep up to speed on new major legislation regarding AI that will have data privacy implications, including the upcoming EU AI Act. And here in the US, while it may be a stretch for us to see a new comprehensive US Federal AI law anytime in the near future, individual US states may follow suit with new and supplemental data privacy laws as AI technology becomes increasingly prevalent.

Since AI technology will continue to rapidly advance and the huge amounts of data to fuel this technology becomes even more important, every day is Data Privacy Day!