US: Google faces class action lawsuit for ‘secretly’ stealing users' data to train its AI

Google has been sued for allegedly “secretly stealing everything ever created and shared on the internet by hundreds of millions of Americans” to train its generative AI products like its Bard chatbot.

On Tuesday, a class action suit was filed in a federal court in California against Google, its parent firm Alphabet Inc., and AI sister company DeepMind, for using people’s data without their consent.

The plea was filed by eight individuals, who say they are seeking to represent the millions of internet users affected.

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Among the plaintiffs are an investigative journalist and author, an actor and professor, a six-year-old child, and a young teenager.

If the court finds Google guilty of violating privacy and consumer protection laws, the tech firm would be asked to cough up at least $5 billion in damages.

Claims made by the plaintiffs

"Google has taken all our personal and professional information, our creative and copywritten works, our photographs, and even our emails — virtually the entirety of our digital footprintto build its AI products," the lawsuit claims.

"For years, Google harvested this data in secret, without notice or consent from anyone."

The plaintiffs allege that Google even stole their data from subscription-based websites and from websites known for pirated collections of books and creative works.

Google urges caution with AI chatbots

The lawsuit recalls Google's privacy policy updated on July 1, whichsaysthat it may collect information that's "publicly available online" to train its AI models and build products like Google Translate, Bard, and Cloud AI capabilities.

"Google must understand, once and for all: it does not own the internet, it does not own our creative works, it does not own our expressions of our personhood, pictures of our families and children, or anything else simply because we share it online. Publicly available' has never meant free to use for any purpose." the lawsuit says.

The plaintiffs want Google to give its users the option to opt out of its “illicit data collection”.

They are also asking the tech firm to delete its existing catalogue of data, otherwise, they say Google should pay the owners of that content “fair compensation.”

Google responds

Responding to the accusations, Google general counsel Halimah DeLaine Prado termed the claims “baseless”.

He also denied that the company had been collecting data in secret and said that it had always been clear about using data from public sources to train its AI models, reported Reuters news agency.

Google isn’t the only tech company facing data theft charges. Comedian Sarah Silverman and several authors recently sued OpenAI, the Microsoft-backed maker of ChatGPT, accusing it of using their copyrighted data to train the viral chatbot.

(With inputs from agencies)

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