Machine learning with personal data: Is data protection law smart enough to meet the challenge?

Almost seven decades after Alan Turing conceived of ‘intelligent machines’, there has recently been a surge of interest in machine learning and algorithmic decision-making. The popular imagination has been stirred by high-profile events such as the victory of IBM’s supercomputer, Watson, in the US quiz show Jeopardy, and Google Deepmind’s deep learning program AlphaGo’s victory in the ancient Chinese game Go. Meanwhile, machine learning processes are being deployed in contexts as varied as fraud prevention, medical diagnostics, and the development of autonomous vehicles. The underlying technologies are increasingly accessible to data controllers, with major cloud computing providers including Amazon, IBM, Google, and Microsoft offering low-cost, scalable, cloud-supported machine learning services and tools, with a particular focus on data mining and other types of predictive analytics.