Emotional Privacy at Risk: AI, Human Dignity, and the Future of Governance

As AI systems increasingly interpret and respond to human emotions, they pose profound challenges to privacy, agency, and human dignity. This talk presents a research program that systematically examines these challenges and proposes solutions grounded in both empirical observation and normative theory.

 Kat Roemmich will outline a three-phase research trajectory that begins by identifying the ethical and privacy risks emotion AI poses in social media, workplace, and healthcare contexts through qualitative inquiry; continues with measuring and evaluating these risks using mixed-methods survey designs to elicit normative emotional privacy judgments; and culminates in the development of the Minimal Justice Framework (MJF)—a scalable normative methodology for assessing when AI-enabled data flows violate the “minimal justice” standard of human dignity. Kat Roemmich is a privacy and AI ethics researcher specializing in the societal and ethical impacts of emerging AI technologies, with particular expertise in emotion AI and AI governance. Integrating empirical inquiry with normative theory, her research critically examines how AI systems that interpret and respond to human emotions—especially in social, workplace, and healthcare contexts—introduce novel ethical and privacy risks that challenge prevailing theories of privacy.