Google has updated its privacy policy over the weekend and it might be the start of our dystopian future.
The update will allow the company to collect and analyse information people share online to train its AI models. The tech giant says it will use this information to improve its services and develop new AI-powered products.
Essentially, Google had updated the part of its policy where it says it collects information about you from publicly accessible sources. This could include your public posts on social media.
Previously, this policy only mentioned using the data to train the language and features on Google Translate.
Now, the company has swapped ‘language’ for training ‘AI models’ and added that it would be using it to build additional products like ‘Bard and Cloud AI capabilities’.
Google has highlighted the changes to the privacy policy on its archive, which you can take a look at.
AI chatbots like Google’s Bard, Open AI’s ChatGPT and other generative AI systems create content using large amounts of data scraped from the internet. This includes data publicly available on social media platforms.
We’re already seeing owners of social media platforms try and curb this.
Just this week, Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk limited the number of tweets you can read to make it more difficult for AI companies to collect and manipulate data on the platform.
The billionaire has blamed artificial intelligence (AI) companies like OpenAI, Microsoft Bing and Google Bard for trying to harvest data for training their large language models (LLMs).
Last month, Reddit started charging for access to its API so AI companies can’t use it as a free teaching aid for its language models.
ChatGPT creator OpenAI, is already being sued for secretly scraping ‘massive amounts of personal data from the internet’.
The same week, two US authors sued OpenAI for misusing their work to ‘train’ its viral AI chatbot, ChatGPT.
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