«All your data are belong to us». European perspectives on privacy issues in ‘free’ online machine translation services

Abstract

The English language has taken advantage of the Digital Revolution to establish itself as the global language; however, only 28.6% of Internet users speak English as their native language. Machine Translation (MT) is a powerful technology that can bridge this gap. In development since the mid-20th century, MT has become available to every Internet user in the last decade, due to free online MT services. This paper aims to discuss the implications that these tools may have for the privacy of their users and how they are addressed by EU data protection law. It examines the data-flows in respect of the initial processing (both from the perspective of the user and the MT service provider) and potential further processing that may be undertaken by the MT service provider.