On 15 October 2026 the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) published a policy brief, Enhancing user control and privacy protections in the context of AI, on how people can keep control over personal data used to build AI systems.
The brief notes that much AI training data comes from two sources: people’s conversations with generative AI tools such as chatbots, and the scraping of publicly available internet content. It observes that many developers now offer global opt-out settings, but argues there is room for more granular controls and “just-in-time transparency” that informs users at the moment they interact, rather than relying only on privacy policies.
The OECD also warns that personal data can be “memorised” in model weights, making access, correction and erasure difficult, and calls for pragmatic collaboration between regulators and industry, including research on machine unlearning. It adds that increasingly autonomous AI agents will challenge traditional data protection principles, though agents might also help users manage their privacy.
For Catholic reflection on AI, the brief’s concern for the person behind the data resonates with the Church’s insistence that human beings must not be reduced to data.
