Google changed its privacy policy a few days ago. Changes that allow the web giant to use anything you post online to train its artificial intelligence models. At first glance, France does not seem concerned.
It’s the year of artificial intelligence: but to train the systems, you need a lot of data. That’s good, Google is an expert in the field and has been recognized for years. The company is going even further this time by collecting more data.
Anything you post can be used to train Google’s AIs
In one of the sections of Google’s privacy policy, we can now read that “Google uses information to improve its services and to develop new products, features and technologies to benefit its users and the general public. For example, we use publicly available information to train Google’s AI models and build products and features such as Google Translate, Bard, and Cloud AI capabilities.»
But what do you publish with your Google account? We can think that this concerns comments on YouTube, reviews left on Google Maps, those left on apps in the Play Store, etc. For some accounts, this can represent astronomical amounts of text and images.
Further, we can read that Google can “collect publicly available information online or from other public sources to help train the AI models of Google“. It’s hard to understand what that means: it almost feels like Google wants to scan the entire public web. Google has not yet commented on this sentence.
No change in France, for the moment
This change in privacy rules put in place July 1 only applies to the United States. On the French page of Google, no mention of these changes, although there were modifications on this same date.
We can think that since Google Bard is not available in France (even if a roundabout way allows access to it), Google cannot exploit the data of its users within the European Union. All for questions of GDPR, European data protection legislation. Additionally, the AI Act being drafted promises to further protect users.
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