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Comment by jnurmine | Hacker News Reader

"Draft changes would create new exceptions for AI companies that would allow them to legally process special categories of data (like a person’s religious or political beliefs, ethnicity or health data) to train and operate their tech."

Fully anonymized health data I can somehow understand, but what kind of AI needs to be trained with "a person's religious or political beliefs [or] ethnicity", anonymized or not?

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>but what kind of AI needs to be trained with "a person's religious or political beliefs [or] ethnicity", anonymized or not?

It's a category thing. There is personal data and then there is sensitive personal data, which is the enumerated list you quoted.

Snarky non-answer reply is of course -- the kind of ШІ that makes autistic roman salutes and accelerates from 0 to 1933.

Ethnicity can correlate with certain genetic or health predispositions - for instance, the U.S. has long recognized that some conditions (like sickle-cell anemia or hypertension) appear more frequently in Black populations. If AI systems were forbidden from even considering such demographic factors, diagnostic accuracy could suffer.

> but what kind of AI needs to be trained with "a person's religious or political beliefs [or] ethnicity"

Propaganda AI. The EU openly declared that it will create a ministry of truth. Officially called 'fighting disinformation' of course.

These categories of data are already somewhat special under the GDPR. I think we've committed enough genocide that now they're enshrined into protected data types.

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