Governance

Purpose Limitation

Definition

The GDPR principle that personal data must be collected for specified, explicit, and legitimate purposes and not further processed in a way incompatible with those purposes. This constrains organisations from repurposing customer data to train internal AI models without fresh consent or a lawful basis.

Related Terms

GDPR + AI

The intersection of the General Data Protection Regulation with AI systems. Key tensions include the right to explanation for automated decisions (Article 22), data minimisation requirements that limit training data use, and purpose limitation that constrains repurposing of collected data for model training.

Data Minimisation

The GDPR principle requiring that only the minimum necessary personal data be collected and processed for a specified purpose. Applied to AI, data minimisation drives techniques like federated learning, synthetic data generation, and differential privacy to train effective models without retaining raw personal data.

Data Governance

The policies, processes, and standards that manage data availability, usability, integrity, and security throughout its lifecycle. Strong data governance is a prerequisite for trustworthy AI—the EU AI Act explicitly requires data governance practices for training, validation, and testing datasets.

Knowing the Terms Is Step One. Applying Them Is Step Two.

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