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

[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.