Why Is Google Facing a Lawsuit Against Its Privacy Policies?

The tech giant Google has been charged with a lawsuit centred around its AI technology. The company made headlines when it updated its privacy policy to allow the company to scrape all publicly available data on the internet. 

This change in policy gave Google the ability to train its artificial intelligence (AI) models on every available public information. 

READ| What is Google’s New Policy to Train AI?

The new changes in the privacy policy have already raised concerns. Some privacy advocates have raised concerns that the company is collecting too much data about its users. Others have argued that Google's use of this data gives it an unfair advantage over its competitors.

The lawsuit on Google was first reported by CNN and it stated “The proposed class action suit against Google, its parent company Alphabet, and Google’s AI subsidiary DeepMind was filed in a federal court in California on Tuesday, and was brought by Clarkson Law Firm. The firm previously filed a similar suit against ChatGPT-maker OpenAI last month.”

This lawsuit is just one example of the potential copyright concerns that arise from AI-generated content. As these tools become more sophisticated, it is likely that we will see more lawsuits alleging copyright infringement.

Artificial Intelligence tools are gaining traction for their capabilities to generate written content and images within seconds reducing human efforts. But, these abilities come at the expense of losing personal data to these tools. 

Tim Giordano, one of the attorneys at Clarkson mentioned “Google needs to understand that ‘publicly available’ has never meant free to use for any purpose”.

“Our personal information and our data is our property, and it’s valuable, and nobody has the right to just take it and use it for any purpose”, he added. 

According to CNN, the lawsuit is seeking “temporary freeze on commercial access to and commercial development of Google’s generative AI tools like Bard.” 

It further seeks payments from the company as compensation to those whose data was used by Google without any permission. 

The General Counsel of Google, Halimah DeLaine Prado told CNN that the lawsuit is “baseless”. She further added, “We’ve been clear for years that we use data from public sources — like information published to the open web and public datasets — to train the AI models behind services like Google Translate, responsibly and in line with our AI Principles”

To conclude, the lawsuit against Google brings light to the complex challenges that are associated with AI technology. It serves as a reminder that even the most influential tech companies must be held accountable for the impact of their innovations.