A lawsuit accusing tech giant Google of scraping people’s data without consent and violating copyright laws has been filed with a US federal court in California.
The complaint alleges that Google “has been secretly stealing everything ever created and shared on the internet by hundreds of millions of Americans,” taking people’s “personal and professional information” in order to build its commercial AI products such as chatbot Bard.
The lawsuit, brought forth by public interest law firm Clarkson, names Google, its parent company Alphabet, and AI research subsidiary Google DeepMind as the defendants.
“Google needs to understand that ‘publicly available’ has never meant free to use for any purpose,” Clarkson attorney Tim Giordano told a US media outlet. “Our personal information and our data is our property, and it’s valuable, and nobody has the right to just take it and use it for any purpose.”
While the US Federal Trade Commission stated last month that companies should collect the data for their algorithms’ improvement “lawfully,” Google simply decided to “quietly” update its online privacy policy “to double down on its position that everything on the internet is fair game for the company to take for private gain and commercial use,” the lawsuit posits.
The plaintiffs in the case seek “injunctive relief in the form of a temporary freeze on commercial development and commercial use,” as well as unspecified damages.
“Clarkson is asking Open AI and Google to temporarily pause commercial use of all AI products and allow for the coordination of a responsible deployment of this powerful technology,” reads a statement posted on Clarkson’s website.
Ryan Clarkson, founder and managing partner at Clarkson, also suggested that Google should provide people with an opportunity to “opt out” of having their data used in the AI training process.