Google to use public data for its artificial intelligence products, changes privacy policy

(NewsNation) — Google updated its privacy policy over the weekend with new language that says the company uses “publicly available information” to help train its artificial intelligence models.

This means anything posted online will now become part of the company’s AI products, according to multiple technology publications.

“[Google] is letting people know and making it clear that anything they publicly post online could be used to train Bard, its future versions and any other generative AI product Google develops,” wrote Engadget’s Mariella Moon.

Gizmodo’s Thomas Germain put it more bluntly.

“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,” he wrote.

The key changes, which are effective this month, can be found under a section outlining the company’s business reasons for using data.

“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,” the policy reads.

Those updates are highlighted below in green.

Google updated its privacy policy on Saturday to include AI models.

Previously, Google’s policy said the data would be used for “language” models like Google Translate and made no mention of Bard and Cloud AI.

A spokesperson for the company responded to NewsNation via email Tuesday evening.

“Our privacy policy has long been transparent that Google uses publicly available information from the open web to train language models for services like Google Translate,” the statement reads. “This latest update simply clarifies that newer services like Bard are also included.”

Google said it incorporates privacy principles into its AI technologies, as outlined here.

AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Bard have offered a glimpse into the future but they’ve also raised new concerns about privacy online. That’s because those applications are built on large language models (LLMs) which are trained on massive amounts of data.

The question now is how the data on the internet will be used going forward.

Earlier this year, the popular discussion forum Reddit, announced changes to its application programming interface (API). As of July 1, Reddit began charging some third-party apps to access data on the site. Previously, that access was free.

Over the weekend, Twitter CEO Elon Musk said he was temporarily limiting the number of posts users could see to address “extreme levels of data scraping.”