Google faces a lawsuit alleging data scraping from millions of users to train its AI tools, without users’ consent and violating copyright laws.
Google faces a lawsuit over allegations of data scraping from millions of users without consent to train its AI tools. The suit seeks a temporary freeze on commercial use of Google’s AI tools and financial compensation for those affected.
Google is facing a wide-ranging lawsuit claiming the tech giant has violated copyright laws and scraped data from millions of users without their consent. The suit alleges Google used this data to train and improve its AI tools, such as chatbot Bard. Filed by Clarkson Law Firm in a federal court in California, the action targets Google, its parent company Alphabet, and Google’s AI subsidiary DeepMind.
The complaint suggests Google has been covertly gathering everything ever created and shared on the internet by hundreds of millions of Americans, including “creative and copyrighted works”, and using this to fuel the development of its AI products. Representatives for the companies have yet to comment on the case.
A recent update to Google’s privacy policy is cited in the lawsuit, which explicitly states the company may use publicly accessible information to train its AI models and tools. While the company maintains transparency, stating its long-held policy is to use publicly available data from the open web, critics argue this stance doesn’t provide free use for any purpose.
The lawsuit is seeking a temporary freeze on commercial access to and commercial development of Google’s generative AI tools, along with unspecified damages and financial compensation for those whose data was allegedly misused by Google. Eight plaintiffs are currently lined up, including a minor.
