Google says: All your words are belong to us

[thewayne]

Over the weekend Google updated their Terms of Service to say that they'll scrape everything they can see online and use it to train their AI systems.

From the article: "...the company reserves the right to scrape just about everything you post online to build its AI tools. 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."

Now, there's something very important here. Google is not talking about words that you've posted on Google servers, like Gmail or Spaces or whatever. They're talking the ENTIRE World Wide Web. Facebook. Restaurant reviews. Blogs. Etc. ANYTHING AND EVERYTHING.

And it wouldn't surprise me in the least if they ignored robots.txt block lists. Odds are the only thing that'd keep them out is passworded areas, and they know some ways around those.

Remember when Google announced that their corporate motto was "Don't be evil"? How I laughed at that! Didn't people realize that it was a hipster ironic statement? There was an unprinted subtext that followed: "... as long as it doesn't get in the way of us making a bazillion dollars and ruling the universe."

https://gizmodo.com/google-says-itll-scrape-everything-you-post-online-for-1850601486

Comments

[blue_green_dream]

I used to work in SEO before being laid off in April, and I cannot believe my luck in getting out of that industry at exactly the right time.

[thewayne]

I don't know that I could work in that industry, a proverbial tip of my hat to you surviving it and getting out!

[dewline]

The arrogance of this...

[thewayne]

Classic Google.  Now their corporate motto is "Fuck 'Don't be evil', make money at any cost!"

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

Well, they're going to get sued, because not everyone uses Google and thus is relevant to their terms of service. Like say, the government. It has websites it probably doesn't want them doing that to. That'll be a fun fight.

[motodraconis]

What the actual fuck!

[disneydream06]

NOTHING is private online. UGH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Hugs, Jon

[thewayne]

Largely true.

[silveradept]

Somehow, I'm not surprised. This is the kind of think that should result in an entire flotilla of copyright infringement suits, since, after all, just because someone posts a thing online does not mean they have granted a license to anyone to use it. And for those of us who have, many of the provisions that are there require both credit to the original author and not being used in any commercial products, so there's probably an entire large load of license violation suits that could happen, just so long as someone can prove that their own work is present in the training models or otherwise for the chatbot. Google, being Google, can probably swat away any of the lower claims, but I would expect the government's own lawyers to get involved in this because it's pretty well going to be something that affects everyone and they did not consent to the use of their words in this way.

[kaishin108]

I regret that I have gmail and have all kinds of stuff in Google Drive, sigh.

[thewayne]

I have several Gmail addresses, but I don't do any personal correspondence thru them.  Let 'em mine them for all they want, they might learn something about interlibrary loan document requests that fly around the country.

[kaishin108]

Who is a good email provider then? I do have a yahoo account. I am not sure what to do with everything in my google drive. I only have a chromebook and an iPhone (old).

[thewayne]

I use Yahoo as my main email address.  Microsoft Outlook also does free email.  I think Proton Mail is free, not certain on that.  Of course, with a Chromebook, you do need a Google account for some Chromebook services, but that doesn't mean you have to use their email.

[kaishin108]

Thank you, good to know. Do you use the free yahoo mail account or the paid one? I bought the paid one for a few months but I didn't notice much difference.

[thewayne]

Free is good enough for me.

[kaishin108]

Right, I didn't see much difference when I tried the paid version.
Thanks again.