Share and Follow
CHICAGO — A pressing alert has been issued by Illinois’ chief legal authority, spotlighting potential vulnerabilities in privacy due to existing loopholes.
Your personal information, ranging from vacation destinations and phone locations to shopping habits and internet searches, is being traded by private data brokers. This data also encompasses political inclinations and healthcare details, raising concerns as it’s sometimes accessed by federal agencies, posing a threat to individual privacy.
ABC7 Chicago is now streaming 24/7. Click here to watch
Digital privacy specialists and the Illinois Attorney General caution that federal capabilities to scrutinize private life details are unprecedented. This is largely due to the commercialization and AI-driven analysis of personal data.
In response, the Attorney General is advocating alongside others for congressional action to seal these loopholes, which they assert infringe on personal privacy and could violate Fourth Amendment rights.
“Large-scale data presents significant risks and power to those who wield it,” stated Ben Zhou, a computer science professor at the University of Chicago, highlighting the critical nature of this issue.
He told the I-Team while most of that data is not connected to your identity when it is bought and sold, any entity, including the government, using powerful artificial intelligence models could potentially draw specific conclusions about who you are simply based on your daily activities.
“Once you have multiple dimensions of data, you can sort of break anonymity fairly quickly, ” Zhou added. “Whether it’s used for advertising or tracking locations or identifying political affiliations, whatever it is that you may want, everything that we do in our lives is basically out there.”
It’s why Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul said he and 16 other attorneys general are asking Congress to close loopholes allowing the federal government to buy bulk data on Americans without a judicial warrant. He said federal agencies have already purchased billions of records enabling them to track an individual’s movements, routines, and daily lives.
“With the use of AI, profiles can be created and data can be collected that would otherwise require a warrant.” Raoul said.
He said it’s time for the federal government to update outdated privacy laws and mandate the deletion of unlawfully collected data.
“Members of Congress are very concerned about federal investigative agencies bypassing constitutional protections,” he explained.
Zhao emphasized the potential for misuse or even misidentification of profiles is alarming, because even best-in-class AI models make mistakes.
“Just errors that are just flat out, you know, made from thin air, accusing people of specific patterns that they’ve done or things that they bought or activities they’ve taken part in, and it could just all be wrong,” he warned. “The negative consequences on people’s lives could be really, really severe.”
Both Zhao and Attorney General Raoul say this should not be a partisan issue because privacy rights affect everyone, regardless of political affiliation.
Copyright © 2026 WLS-TV. All Rights Reserved.