Artificial intelligence promises to transform — and indeed, has already transformed — entire industries, from civic planning and health care to cybersecurity. But privacy remains an unsolved challenge in the industry, particularly where compliance and regulation are concerned.

Recent controversies put the problem into sharp relief. The Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust, a division of the U.K.’s National Health Service based in London, provided Alphabet’s DeepMind with data on 1.6 million patients without their consent. Google — whose health data-sharing partnership with Ascension became the subject of scrutiny in November — abandoned plans to publish scans of chest X-rays over concerns that they contained personally identifiable information. This past summer, Microsoft quietly removed a data set (MS Celeb) with more than 10 million images of people after it was revealed that some weren’t aware they had been included. Read More