#339 Eamonn Maguire: Your Child Has a Data Profile Before They're Born

About this episode

Eamonn Maguire discusses the implications of data profiling before birth and the challenges of data ownership in the age of AI.

What if your child already has a data profile, and they haven't even been born yet? In this episode of Eye on AI, Craig Smith sits down with Eamonn Maguire, Director of Engineering for AI and ML at Proton, to explore one of the most urgent and underappreciated questions in the age of AI: who owns your data, who is building a profile on you, and what can actually be done about it? Eamonn brings a rare combination of depth and range to this conversation. With a PhD from Oxford, a postdoc at CERN, and years at Facebook engineering ML systems to detect internal and external threats, he now leads Proton's AI efforts, including Lumo, their end-to-end encrypted alternative to ChatGPT. He makes a compelling case that the surveillance economy is not just a privacy problem but a behavioral one, where the systems profiling you are not only observing who you are but actively shaping who you become. We get into how just three data points are enough for advertisers to infer your age, political leanings, religion, and spending habits. We discuss why trusting mainstream AI platforms with sensitive data is a structural problem, not just a policy one, and why the AI labs with the best models got…

People in this episode

Host: Craig Smith

Guest: Eamonn Maguire

Topics covered

• data privacy
• AI ethics
• surveillance economy
• data ownership
• machine learning
• behavioral profiling

Keywords

• data profile
• AI
• privacy
• advertising
• behavioral data
• encryption
• machine learning

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Proton, Facebook, CERN

Products: Lumo, ChatGPT

Places: Oxford

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