LogInGoogle's Bard and Cloud AI can now be trained using your public information, as per the company's updated privacy policy.
Back in February, in a bid to join the AI chatbot race spearheaded by OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google officially unveiled Bard, a brand-new conversational AI service that many thought would quickly become a competitor to ChatGPT. Not even a week after the initial announcement, Google's chatbot hit the headlines for making a factual mistake during an advert, causing the shares of Alphabet, Google's parent company, to fall 9%.
Leaving the controversies related to its announcement behind, Bard would go on and get released in March, with its first stable release launching on May 15, 2023. Since then, Google's chatbot managed to cause no significant disputes, becoming just one more conversational AI one might use instead of ChatGPT.
A few days ago, however, Bard's controversy-free streak abruptly ended when Google updated its privacy policy, openly declaring that everyone's data can now be utilized for training the company's AI models, as long as the data is considered "publicly available".
First noticed by Techsport, the updated policy now explicitly states that the company can gather and analyze virtually any information that individuals share on the internet to train its AI systems, including Bard, Cloud AI, and Google Translate. Previously, the policy only encompassed the company's language models like Google Translate. However, with the recent update, the scope of the rule has significantly expanded, making all your online searches and posts subject to being used as training materials, with or without your consent.
"We may collect information that's publicly available online or from other public sources to help train Google's AI models and build products and features like Google Translate, Bard, and Cloud AI capabilities," reads the rewritten policy. "Or, if your business's information appears on a website, we may index and display it on Google services."
"For example, if your name appears in your local newspaper, Google's Search engine may index that article and display it to other people if they search for your name," it continues. "We may also collect information about you from trusted partners, such as directory services who provide us with business information to be displayed on Google's services, marketing partners who provide us with information about potential customers of our business services, and security partners who provide us with information to protect against abuse."
What do you think about the policy change? What's your take on this sort of data scraping? Leave your thoughts in the comments!
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