Google's policy update confirms that all your posted content will be utilized for AI training

[midian182]

A hot potato: If you were in any doubt that the content you post publicly online will be fed to AI models, take a look at Google's updated privacy policy. The document now explicitly states that the company reserves the right to collect and analyze pretty much anything people share on the web to train its AI systems.

Google's update over the weekend introduced new wording to its privacy policy. It previously stated that people's data would be used to train "language" models, mentioning only Google Translate. The updated version changes this to "AI models," specifically mentioning Bard and Cloud AI alongside Translate.

One of the many contentious issues with generative AI systems such as ChatGPT and Bard is the way they scrape and use data. It might be publicly available information, but that doesn't stop the plagiarism and privacy concerns, not to mention the possibility of the AI misinterpreting what was said or offering up old, outdated answers. Even Google has warned employees to be cautious when using chatbots like its own Bard as they can make undesired code suggestions.

There's also a question of whether this sort of data scraping is even legal. ChatGPT creator OpenAI is facing lawsuits over accusations that it collected personal information from internet users illegally and used the data to create its products.

OpenAI is also dealing with a lawsuit over copyright infringement and privacy violations relating to claims that it used copyrighted books without permission to train its AI systems. The company allegedly copied text from these titles unlawfully by not obtaining consent from the copyright holders and not giving them credit or compensation.

To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we've applied the following temporary limits:

- Verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day
- Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day
- New unverified accounts to 300/day

– Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 1, 2023

Data scraping seems to be an especially vexing subject for Elon Musk. Twitter over the weekend temporarily limited the number of tweets accounts could read per day to allegedly address "extreme levels" of data scraping and "system manipulation" on the platform – though not everyone agrees this was the reason for the limitation.

Reddit has also faced a slew of troubles since turning off free access to its APIs to stop data harvesting. The move resulted in over 8,000 subreddits going dark in protest and some switching to NSFW.

Permalink to story.

https://www.techspot.com/news/99281-google-policy-update-confirms-itll-scrape-everything-you.html

 

[DSirius]

Time to move to a better email service than Gmail. And for those who ask which is better: those with a better and default security and privacy policy.
I am thinking to Proton mail, Tuttanota, Posteo.
If you know others please share them.

 

[wiyosaya]

Its no wonder that some of the AI systems produce crap answers, IMO.

Time to move to a better email service than Gmail. And for those who ask which is better: those with a better and default security and privacy policy.
I am thinking to Proton mail, Tuttanota, Posteo.
If you know others please share them.

www.runbox.com

EDIT: Even though its paid, I went with them precisely because of "scraping" concerns of most of the other "free" e-mail services. That, and I was changing my ISP to a service that did not have a mail server.

 

[OortCloud]

The internet continues to be both an amazing construct and yet at the same time ruin our lives.

 

[dangh]

I guess they want to fully sponsor EU...

 

[human7]

It's all about the money. Now that there's a way to turn content into profit besides putting ads next to them, everyone wants a slice of the pie. The copyright claims are unlikely to win, since it's easy to defend AI as a transformative work, but who knows. The bigger issues will be around terms of service. In many places around the world, terms of service are theoretically unenforceable because they can't be negotiated in good faith, making them standard form contracts which are illegal. But standard form contracts are (sadly) legal in the U.S. Remains to be seen how cross-jurisdictional issues will be handled.

Lawmakers in the U.S. don't have a right to complain about any of this, since they still haven't passed privacy legislation (they seem more interested in banning TikTok than passing privacy legislation - which would of course address the issue around TikTok in the first place). Time will tell how this all shakes out. I expect in the long run the AI models will survive. The genie's out of the bottle, and it would be very hard to undo that.

 

[ddferrari]

Time to move to a better email service than Gmail. And for those who ask which is better: those with a better and default security and privacy policy.
I am thinking to Proton mail, Tuttanota, Posteo.
If you know others please share them.

Email (including Gmail) is not publicly posted content - to which this story refers. Public postings include things like social media, Google reviews and yes, posts on websites like Techspot. This news does not apply to anyone's private email, regardless of which provider you use.

There is no reason to switch your email account, based on this article.

 

[ddferrari]

It's all about the money. Now that there's a way to turn content into profit besides putting ads next to them, everyone wants a slice of the pie. The copyright claims are unlikely to win, since it's easy to defend AI as a transformative work, but who knows. The bigger issues will be around terms of service. In many places around the world, terms of service are theoretically unenforceable because they can't be negotiated in good faith, making them standard form contracts which are illegal. But standard form contracts are (sadly) legal in the U.S. Remains to be seen how cross-jurisdictional issues will be handled.

Lawmakers in the U.S. don't have a right to complain about any of this, since they still haven't passed privacy legislation (they seem more interested in banning TikTok than passing privacy legislation - which would of course address the issue around TikTok in the first place). Time will tell how this all shakes out. I expect in the long run the AI models will survive. The genie's out of the bottle, and it would be very hard to undo that.

The best privacy legislation is one's own judgment; they should not post opinions in a public forum unless being perfectly comfortable with any and every human on Earth with internet having access to it.

Again, this article is referring to public posts, not private emails and secured chats.

 

[Inthenstus]

Time to move to a better email service than Gmail. And for those who ask which is better: those with a better and default security and privacy policy.
I am thinking to Proton mail, Tuttanota, Posteo.
If you know others please share them.

I switched to Proton mail recently from Yahoo. It’s been great.

 

[Gastec]

Time to upgrade my posted content on Google from sh...it to cr...APP and then stop using everything from Google. It's going to be inconvenient but it's like alcohol addiction, if you don't give it up you have a VERY high chance of dying a horrible and painful death from liver cirrhosis,liver cancer and/or pancreatic cancer.

 

[JamesBlond]

The Google Tyrannical Gov.
There should be a law in each country, if Google wants to use your data or your clicks or history they should have to pay $100000 to each person for the data.

 

[DSirius]

Email (including Gmail) is not publicly posted content - to which this story refers. Public postings include things like social media, Google reviews and yes, posts on websites like Techspot. This news does not apply to anyone's private email, regardless of which provider you use.

There is no reason to switch your email account, based on this article.

I read new Google Terms of service. Google state that new update policy is applying to all of their App and services, this include gmail, google maps, youtube, and most imprortant Google Android services, which include your phone calls, audio-video recordings and sms.
What Google weaselly says in their EULA, is that Google will not use or share your personal data which can identify and reveal your identity with 3rd parties like advertisers.
But that they CAN and WILL use all your data for their own services.
Even if article mention the "publicly online", these are empty words, all your data which you generate using Google services will be used to train Google's AI. Whatever you consider personal data for yourself, for corporations like Google is available to use, as long as you use their services. You can alleviate some data which Google collects, by manually settings more tight privacy, but even so, a lot of data is collected regardless, because those settings were intentionally designed so.
So, it is worse than most of the people or Google users think.
Corporations like Google has to be strict regulated faster.

 

[p51d007]

Time to move to a better email service than Gmail. And for those who ask which is better: those with a better and default security and privacy policy.
I am thinking to Proton mail, Tuttanota, Posteo.
If you know others please share them.

It's crazy...we have multiple accounts with schools across the state.
They won't allow us access to their servers to do updates to our software on
their servers. They have multiple security stops set up.
But...their school uses GMAIL!

 

[p51d007]

Email (including Gmail) is not publicly posted content - to which this story refers. Public postings include things like social media, Google reviews and yes, posts on websites like Techspot. This news does not apply to anyone's private email, regardless of which provider you use.

There is no reason to switch your email account, based on this article.

Boy, these AI generated things will be REALLY AWFUL, if all they scrape is "social media" LOL

 

[toooooot]

Email (including Gmail) is not publicly posted content - to which this story refers. Public postings include things like social media, Google reviews and yes, posts on websites like Techspot. This news does not apply to anyone's private email, regardless of which provider you use.

There is no reason to switch your email account, based on this article.

I believe you, I do not believe them.

 

[OortCloud]

Some of the code GPT produces is pretty awful. I can only imagine how bad The-Omnishambles-That-Is-Google will be.

 

[ddferrari]

I believe you, I do not believe them.

Ohhh, you!!

The article clearly states " If you were in any doubt that the content you post publicly online will be fed to AI models...".

This clearly excludes private email - of which exposing such publicly is a federal crime.

So yes - please do believe me and relax! Paranoia will only make one more miserable, not safer.

 

[toooooot]

Ohhh, you!!

The article clearly states " If you were in any doubt that the content you post publicly online will be fed to AI models...".

This clearly excludes private email - of which exposing such publicly is a federal crime.

So yes - please do believe me and relax! Paranoia will only make one more miserable, not safer.

They could create a lame excuse such as: "we will remove names and personal info AND ONLY THEN we will use email text for ai!"
Win win.