EU AI Act Won't Kill Innovation, Says Logitech Privacy Head
Logitech’s global AI lead doesn’t "subscribe" to the idea that the EU AI Act will stifle innovation, she said Wednesday.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Privacy Daily provides accurate coverage of newsworthy developments in data protection legislation, regulation, litigation, and enforcement for privacy professionals responsible for ensuring effective organizational data privacy compliance.
Many of the European law’s obligations “hang on risk assessments, red-teaming exercises [and] things like that,” said Emerald de Leeuw, Logitech global head of AI governance and privacy, during a webinar hosted by Daniel Solove, a George Washington Law School professor. De Leeuw said AI Act obligations amount to "stuff that you should already be doing if you do anything that is high risk."
The European Commission said last week that it will not postpone AI Act deadlines (see 2507070019). Meanwhile, Europe is considering ways to simplify the General Data Protection Regulation (see 2507090006).
The Logitech official expects that some upcoming changes to the GDPR will have the goal of harmonizing the European privacy law with the AI Act, she said. One example is how to handle data scraping, "which has been a kind of nails-on-the-chalkboard sort of word in the European world for quite some time," said de Leeuw. "But obviously, we also know how some of these [AI] tools sometimes come to be and that doesn't really lend itself that well to how the GDPR is organized."
AI governance is being added to privacy professionals' remit at many companies, noted de Leeuw, saying that happened to her at Logitech. Some privacy pros, like herself, "are super thrilled about it," but she said others say, "Oh my goodness, there's so much regulation.”
"There's [a] deep learning curve,” said de Leeuw: However, “if you're not … a little bit uncomfortable, you're probably not really challenging yourself."