The FTC’s ‘profoundly vague’ plan to force companies to destroy algorithms could get very messy

Image caption: The first step in killing an algorithm involves taking the model out of operation. Image credit: CreepyCube / iStock / Getty Images Plus; Protocol. Article by Kate Kaye. Protocol – March 17, 2022.

Companies take algorithms out of production all the time. But wiping an AI model and the data that built it off the face of the earth could be a lot more challenging.

“The premise is simple,” FTC Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter and FTC lawyers wrote last year. They were talking about a little-used enforcement tool called algorithmic disgorgement, a penalty the agency can wield against companies that used deceptive data practices to build algorithmic systems like AI and machine-learning models. The punishment: They have to destroy ill-gotten data and the models built with it. But while privacy advocates and critics of excessive data collection are praising the concept in theory, in practice it could be anything but simple to implement. […]

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