The lawsuit alleged that Google, along with AI sister company DeepMind, and parent company Alphabet, accessed people’s data without consent
A new lawsuit has claimed that Google has been “secretly stealing everything ever created and shared on the internet by hundreds of millions of Americans”. It was stolen to train its generative AI products, such as its chatbot Bard. The proposed class-action lawsuit was filed by Clarkson Law Firm. It was filed in the US District Court for the Northern District of California on Tuesday, July 11. It alleged that Google, along with AI sister company DeepMind, and parent company Alphabet, accessed people’s data without consent.
The lawsuit says, “Google has taken all our personal and professional information, our creative and copywritten works, our photographs, and even our emails — virtually the entirety of our digital footprint” to build its AI products.” It added, “For years, Google harvested this data in secret, without notice or consent from anyone.”
The data allegedly accessed was reportedly taken from subscription-based websites. It was also allegedly obtained from websites known for pirated books. The complaint cited that as per an update to Google’s privacy policy from July 1, it may gather information that is “publicly available online”. This data would subsequently be used for training its AI models. As well as for building products like Google Translate, Bard, and Cloud AI capabilities.
“Google must understand, once and for all: it does not own the internet. It does not own our creative works, it does not own our expressions of our personhood, pictures of our families and children, or anything else simply because we share it online. “‘Publicly available’ has never meant free to use for any purpose,” the lawsuit says.