Google Updates Privacy Policy to Train its AI for Online Posts

Highlights

• Google may now train its AI products using publicly accessible data, according to the new policy.
• By doing this, the business reserves the right to collect and use any data put online.

Google discreetly revised its privacy policy over the weekend, which you most likely missed. Even if the policy's phrasing hasn't changed much from previously, it's enough to cause alarm.

Gizmodo has learned that Google has revised its privacy statement. While much of the policy is unremarkable, one section—the research and development section—now stands out. How Google may utilize your information is described in that section.

How does Google do it?

Google uses the data to make our services better and to make new products, features, and technologies for our users and the general public. We use publicly available data, for instance, to assist in the training of Google's AI models and the development of products and features such as Bard, Cloud AI capabilities, and Google Translate.

This section used to refer to "AI models" rather than "language models" prior to the update. It also only mentioned Google Translate, to which Bard and Cloud AI have since been added.

This is an odd clause for a business to add, as the outlet points out. It's odd because the way it's written implies that the tech giant owns the right to collect and use data from any part of the public internet. A policy like this usually only talks about how the business will use data posted on its own services.

Even though most people probably know that anything they post online will be seen by everyone, this new development opens up a new twist: use. It's not just about who can read what you write online; it's also about how that information will be used.

Bard, ChatGPT, Bing Chat, and other artificial intelligence models that provide real-time information scrape data from the web. It's not uncommon for the information that was sourced to come from other people's ideas. There are currently lawsuits against these AI tools, and there are likely to be more in the future.