Google’s Privacy Policy Change Enables Data Scraping for AI Training Purposes

Google’s latest privacy policy change shows that it can now use publicly accessible data to develop its AI products & services. By revising its privacy policies, Google can now leverage publicly accessible data for AI training.

Google implemented an update to its privacy policy on the 1st of July. Anyone interested can compare the latest version to earlier versions by accessing the link on the website’s update page. The upgrade adds Google’s AI models to services that use public data.

Over the long weekend, Google updated its privacy policy to collect public data for AI training.

The data will train Google's AI models and build products/features such as Google Translate, Bard, and Cloud AI capabilities.

Key points:
-Google can use any information people post… pic.twitter.com/JOhmA5rBHY

— Rowan Cheung (@rowancheung) July 4, 2023

Recent Lawsuit Against OpenAI

Google’s recent privacy policy update coincides with a lawsuit filed in California against OpenAI. The lawsuit alleges that OpenAI unlawfully scraped private user info from the internet. It is worth mentioning this context as it relates to the timing of Google’s policy changes.

The lawsuit accuses OpenAI of using data from various sources to train, OpenAI’s ChatGPT without obtaining proper consent. The sources include social media comments, Wikipedia, and blogs. The lawsuit argues that this action violated numerous internet users’ privacy rights and copyrights. The claim suggests that OpenAI’s use of such data without explicit permission breached user privacy and copyright laws.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) Data Scrapping on Twitter

Rumors circulating online suggest that Twitter’s latest change in tweet accessibility, based on account verification status, may have been partially influenced by concerns over AI-related data scraping. These speculations speculate that Twitter implemented the change to address potential issues related to the scraping of data by AI systems.

Twitter’s developer documentation states that the inclusion of rate limits was to control the number of requests directed at Twitter’s program interface. Twitter owner/ex-CEO Elon Musk recently took to Twitter to express concerns about the app experiencing extensive data pillaging. According to Musk’s tweet, the significant data extraction was causing a decline in service quality for regular users.

The featured image is from cointelegraph.com