MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.–In a case that may someday have implications for credit unions as they expand their chat capabilities, Google has been sued in a putative class action in federal court in California that accuses the company of violating privacy laws and committing “ongoing theft” by scraping internet users’ online data to train its chatbot without their consent.
The Google case, and a parallel one filed last month against Microsoft and OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, demands that the tech companies compensate internet users for this data appropriation, the New York Times reported.
According to the analysis, the cases represent “an evolution of people’s understanding of the value of data,” Tracey Cowan, a partner at Clarkson, which filed the suits, told the times.
Understanding the Footprint
“People increasingly understand that their Internet footprint…holds economic value to tech companies,” the report observed. “In the social media economy, an industry of data brokers emerged to buy and sell such data. In the A.I. age, similar data is being used to train new generative A.I. tools.”
In addition, the Times reported the suits go a step further, adding to the “public cries for a temporary halt to the commercialization of A.I. pending the development of guidelines.”
“We are all just guinea pigs in their experiment,” Ryan Clarkson, a partner at the firm, told the Times.
Opt-Out Option
In the meantime, the suits call for letting users opt out, so they can better control how tech firms use their data.
For credit unions, the issue over who controls data and where certain pieces of software code have come from could become a basis for litigation in the future, similar to what happened in the past with just a few lines of code underlying ATM operations, for example.
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