Is Personal Privacy Dead or Obsolete in Today’s Data Driven World?

Privacy is a powerful core principle and the threat of losing privacy often triggers feelings of being violated or harmed. Individual privacy has been a concern throughout history. Today the continuing impetus to protect privacy is a reaction to companies collecting, storing, and categorizing one’s private data. More alarming is that these companies use Artificial Intelligence and machine-learning[1] software to accurately infer private and sensitive information from one’s activities on the Internet. This paper is an overall review of individual data privacy and how it has evolved over time. I will review regulations and laws meant to protect it. I will highlight what companies are currently doing with private data, what experts say, and what the future might hold. [1] Machine learning is a subset of Artificial Intelligence and a field of computer science that uses statistical techniques to give computer systems the ability to "learn" with data, without being explicitly programmed. Machine learning uses algorithms to predict or classify data.