The law is finally coming after the Wild Wild West of AI, seemingly in response to a class-action lawsuit filed against OpenAI over the weekend. Now, Google has updated its privacy policy to try and protect itself against legal issues. The new policy states that Google is allowed to collect information that is publicly available online or from other public sources to train their AI models. What’s more, the company has also stated that it will use this information to build new products, bolstering the capabilities of Bard and its Cloud AI models. 

While these changes have been seen as a way to tighten the tech giant’s grip over user data, it also sets a dangerous precedent for the new Internet. In a world where free API access is being cut off and companies are collating their data to be sold as a product, Google’s heavy-handed move might create a world where the free Internet is owned by tech giants. 

Google thinks it owns the Internet

For many, Google is the face of the Internet. The Google Search page is the most visited page on the Internet, pulling in 274 million unique users and over 80 billion visits per month. It seems that this has upped Google’s confidence, as the company now seems to think that it owns the Internet. The tech giant is in need of data more than ever before. Google’s calendar is packed with upcoming AI products, notwithstanding the lacklustre performance of Bard. The company’s biggest AI product, the generative search experience, is coming soon, and it needs to eat everything on the Internet to live up to Google Search’s high standards. 

Harvesting publicly available information is nothing new. OpenAI admitted to doing so for training GPT models, Stable Diffusion came under fire for scraping millions of artists’ creations as training. The Large-scale artificial intelligence open network, better known as LAION, is one of the biggest datasets in the AI world today, and it’s all scraped from the Internet. However, including a clause in a privacy policy that all Google users are required to accept, is the first step in a slippery slope which could quickly escalate into messy legal battles and ethical issues. 

Take OpenAI for example. The company was too eager to make its GPT models the best on the Internet, and moved so fast that it ended up inviting the ire of regulatory bodies. The latest crop of lawsuits against the company contain accusations such as “[OpenAI took] essentially every piece of data exchanged on the internet it could”, with no compensation, and that the company copied text from copyrighted books to train its genius models. This presumably set off alarm bells at Google, driving them to quietly update their privacy policy. 

In the cutthroat AI world, companies are simultaneously looking for the next secret sauce that will make their models better than their competition while covering themselves from regulatory problems. With the privacy clause updated by Google, it sets the precedent for many more companies to follow through and create a predatory Internet for everyone. 

Will regulation save us?

Adding this clause might not absolve Google of any legal responsibilities. The company already has a bad track record in the European Union, where it was slapped with €1.49 billion in 2019 for abusive practices in online advertising. This fine stands out in particular, as the regulator accused Google of abusing “its market dominance by imposing a number of restrictive clauses in contracts with third-party websites”. 

This is similar to what the company is trying to do with the new privacy policy. By abusing its widespread user base and market dominance, Google has implicitly made users a part of its data scraping efforts through a clause in its privacy policy. 

This kind of clause can easily be added on to other companies’ privacy policies, giving them free rein over the Internet. In a way, it can be said that Google doing this opens the floodgates for the rest of Silicon Valley to use the Internet as their personal dataset. It might even pave the way for the Internet to become fragmented, with each platform closely guarding their data like a dragon with its hoard. 

Reddit and Twitter have already made their moves towards this, ignoring the backlash of their users to save their data from the ever-growing maw of AI. However, this approach stands antithetical to the very principles of the Internet, which was created to be free and open. 

The AI wave has pushed the Internet to a precipice, pushing data collection by tech giants to the limit. The only hope we have is regulation curbing these predatory practices and ensuring that the Web stays free, open, and safe for all. In the words of Tim Berners Lee, the creator of the Web, “If we give up on building a better web now, then the web will not have failed us. We will have failed the web.”