A new lawsuit accuses Google of stealing people’s data to train its artificial intelligence (AI) products, such as its chatbot Bard, without users’ knowledge or consent. The lawsuit alleges that Google “secretly stole everything that hundreds of millions of Americans created and shared on the internet.
The class-action lawsuit, filed on Tuesday in federal court in the Northern District of California by the Clarkson Law Firm, accuses Google, its AI subsidiary DeepMind and parent company Alphabet of stealing people’s data. “Google took all of our personal and professional information, our creative and copyrighted work, our photos, and even our emails — virtually the entirety of our digital footprint” to build its AI products, the lawsuit claims. “For years, Google secretly collected this data without notifying anyone or asking for consent.
The lawsuit also alleges that Google stole data from subscription-based sites and sites known for pirating books and creative works. The lawsuit also references Google’s July 1 update to its privacy policy, which says the company may collect information available “publicly online” to train its AI models and build products like Google Translate, Bard and Cloud AI.
The lawsuit says: “Google must understand: it does not own the Internet, nor does it own our creative work, our expressions of individuality, our family and children’s photos, or anything else that belongs to us because we share it online. ‘Publicly available’ never meant free to use for any purpose.
In a statement sent to Reuters, Google called the allegations in the lawsuit “baseless.” Halimah DeLaine Prado, Google’s general counsel, told Insider in a statement that the company has been “clear for years” about using data from public sources, such as data posted to the open web and public datasets, to train the Google services like Translate “and is consistent with our AI Principles.
Delaine Prado added: “U.S. law supports the use of publicly available information to create new beneficial uses, and we look forward to dismissing these baseless allegations.
The Clarkson law firm filed a similar complaint against OpenAI two weeks ago, alleging that the company stole “massive amounts of personal data” and used it to train ChatGPT, including medical records and information about children.
One of the plaintiffs in Google’s lawsuit is believed to be a New York Times bestselling author and investigative reporter living in Texas, who claims that Google used a pirated PDF of her book to train Bard. the lawsuit alleges that her work is now widely available for free on Bard and that the bot gives chapter summaries of the book and even shares snippets of the book verbatim.
