Google updated its privacy policy over the weekend, explicitly saying the company reserves the right to scrape just about everything you post online to build its AI tools. If Google can read your words, assume they belong to the company now, and expect that they’re nesting somewhere in the bowels of a chatbot.
“Google uses information to improve our services and to develop new products, features and technologies that benefit our users and the public,” the new Google policy says. “For example, we use publicly available information to help train Google’s AI models and build products and features like Google Translate, Bard, and Cloud AI capabilities.”
Fortunately for history fans, Google maintains a history of changes to its terms of service. The new language amends an existing policy, spelling out new ways your online musings might be used for the tech giant’s AI tools work.
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This is an unusual clause for a privacy policy. Typically, these policies describe ways that a business uses the information that you post on the company’s own services. Here, it seems Google reserves the right to harvest and harness data posted on any part of the public web, as if the whole internet is the company’s own AI playground. Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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Source: Google Says It’ll Scrape Everything You Post Online for AI
The rest of the article goes into Gizomodo’s luddite War Against AI ™ luddite language, unfortunately, because it misses the point that basically this is nothing much new – Google has been able to use any information you type into any of their products for pretty much any purpose (eg advertising, email scanning, etc) for decades (which is why I don’t use Chrome). However it is something that most people simply don’t realise.
Robin Edgar
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