Reading 2 minutes Published Updated
Google has changed its privacy policy to allow any public data to be taken and used for artificial intelligence (AI) training purposes.
An update to the company’s privacy policy was made available on July 1st and can be compared to previous versions of the policy at the link posted on the site’s update page.
In the latest release, changes can be seen that include adding Google’s AI models, Bard’s capabilities, and cloud AI to services that it can train using “publicly available information on the Internet” or from “other publicly available sources.”
The policy update suggests that Google is now making it clear to the public and its users that anything publicly uploaded online can be used in its learning processes with the current and future AI systems it develops.
This update from Google comes shortly after OpenAI, the developer of the popular artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT, was indicted in a class action lawsuit in California for allegedly scraping private information from users over the internet.
It alleged that OpenAI used data from millions of comments on social networks, blogs, Wikipedia and other personal information of users to train ChatGPT without first obtaining consent. The lawsuit concluded that this therefore violated the copyright and privacy rights of millions of users on the Internet.
Related: US VP gathers top tech executives to discuss dangers of AI
Twitter’s recent change in the number of tweets users can access based on their account’s verification status sparked speculation online that it was due in part to AI data scraping.
The Twitter developer documents state that rate limits were introduced as a method to control the volume of requests sent to the Twitter Application Program Interface (API).
Elon Musk, owner and former CEO of Twitter, recently tweeted that the platform has “looted data so much that it has degraded the experience for regular users.”