This week, Google is hit with a class-action lawsuit over its recent privacy policy changes, letting the tech giant use publicly available data for training its Bard chatbot.
This is expected, considering how OpenAI was hit with a similar lawsuit earlier. These companies are accused of scraping the internet data for training their AI products, which may sometimes include the users’ personal information. Considering this a privacy invasion, a law firm is suing Google in California court.
Scraping The Internet For Training AI
Last week, Google updated its privacy policy to let users know that it uses publicly available data for training its AI products. While some didn’t care, some saw these changes as an invasion of privacy, as Google scraps the whole internet data to train its products, especially the recently launched Bard chatbot.
AI Chatbots like ChatGPT or Google Bard need large language models to get better, and they’re often scraped from the internet. This led a law firm called the Clarkson Law Firm to sue OpenAI earlier, seeking damages for using their data for commercial purposes without permission.
Now, the same law firm goes against Google, Alphabet, and DeepMind (Google’s subsidiary) – accusing the defendants of using their data for training their Bard chatbot. The law firm named eight plaintiffs, including a minor, in a class-action lawsuit in the California court this week.
It allows Google “has been secretly stealing everything ever created and shared on the internet by hundreds of millions of Americans” to train its AI products and seeks injunctive relief, like a temporary freeze on commercial access to and commercial development of Google’s generative AI tools.
Further, the lawsuit seeks unspecified damages and payments as financial compensation to the affected people – whose data was allegedly misappropriated by Google. As for how Google tackles his situation is yet to be seen and may include an option to let users opt out of data sharing while using Bard, similar to ChatGPT, to settle the allegations partially.
