🤦🏼‍♀️Machine unlearning is a new challenge in ML
Sometimes ML algorithms have to forget what they have learned. For example, artificial intelligence can destroy privacy. Regulators around the world have the right to compel companies to remove inappropriate information. EU and California citizens may require the company to delete their data. Recently, regulators in the US and Europe have said that owners of artificial intelligence systems must sometimes remove systems trained on sensitive data. And in 2020, the UK data regulator warned companies that some ML programs may be subject to GDPR rights because they contain personal data. In early 2021, the FTC forced facial recognition startup Paravision to remove a collection of incorrectly captured photographs of faces and ML algorithms trained on them.
Thus, we come to a new area of DS called machine learning, which seeks ways to induce selective amnesia for AI in order to remove all traces of a particular person or data point from an ML system without affecting its performance. Some studies have shown that under certain conditions it is possible to make ML algorithms forget something, but this method is not yet ready for use in production. Specifically, in 2019, scientists from the Universities of Toronto and Wisconsin-Madison proposed splitting the raw data for machine learning into multiple parts, each of which is processed separately before the results are combined into the final ML model. If you later need to forget one data point, you only need to reprocess part of the original dataset. Testing has shown that the approach works with online shopping data and a collection of over a million photographs. However, the unlearning system will fail if sent deletion requests are received in a specific sequence. Researchers are now looking for how to solve this problem. However, machine learning techniques are more of a demonstration of technical acumen than a major shift in data protection. After all, even if machines learn to forget, users will have to remember who they are sharing their data with.
https://www.wired.com/story/machines-can-learn-can-they-unlearn/