Disaster Google Says It'll Scrape Everything You Post Online for AI

https://gizmodo.com/google-says-itll-scrape-everything-you-post-online-for-1850601486

https://ghostarchive.org/archive/FTxOq?wr=false

An update to Google's privacy policy suggests that the entire public internet is fair game for it's AI projects.​

Google updated its privacy policy over the weekend, explicitly saying the company reserves the right to scrape just about everything you post online to build its AI tools. If Google can read your words, assume they belong to the company now, and expect that they’re nesting somewhere in the bowels of a chatbot.

“Google uses information to improve our services and to develop new products, features and technologies that benefit our users and the public,” the new Google policy says. “For example, we use publicly available information to help train Google’s AI models and build products and features like Google Translate, Bard, and Cloud AI capabilities.”

Fortunately for history fans, Google maintains a history of changes to its terms of service. The new language amends an existing policy, spelling out new ways your online musings might be used for the tech giant’s AI tools work.

Previously, Google said the data would be used “for language models,” rather than “AI models,” and where the older policy just mentioned Google Translate, Bard and Cloud AI now make an appearance.

This is an unusual clause for a privacy policy. Typically, these policies describe ways that a business uses the information that you post on the company’s own services. Here, it seems Google reserves the right to harvest and harness data posted on any part of the public web, as if the whole internet is the company’s own AI playground. Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The practice raises new and interesting privacy questions. People generally understand that public posts are public. But today, you need a new mental model of what it means to write something online. It’s no longer a question of who can see the information, but how it could be used. There’s a good chance that Bard and ChatGPT ingested your long forgotten blog posts or 15-year-old restaurant reviews. As you read this, the chatbots could be regurgitating some humonculoid version of your words in ways that are impossible to predict and difficult to understand.

One of the less obvious complications of the post ChatGPT world is the question of where data-hungry chatbots sourced their information. Companies including Google and OpenAI scraped vast portions of the internet to fuel their robot habits. It’s not at all clear that this is legal, and the next few years will see the courts wrestle with copyright questions that would have seemed like science fiction a few years ago. In the meantime, the phenomenon already affects consumers in some unexpected ways.

The overlords at Twitter and Reddit feel particularly aggrieved about the AI issue, and made controversial changes to lockdown their platforms. Both companies turned off free access to their API’s which allowed anyone who pleased to download large quantities of posts. Ostensibly, that’s meant to protect the social media sites from other companies harvesting their intellectual property, but it’s had other consequences.

Twitter and Reddit’s API changes broke third-party tools that many people used to access those sites. For a minute, it even seemed Twitter was going to force public entities such as weather, transit, and emergency services to pay if they wanted to Tweet, a move that the company walked back after a hailstorm of criticism.

Lately, web scraping is Elon Musk’s favorite boogieman. Musk blamed a number of recent Twitter disasters on the company’s need to stop others from pulling data off his site, even when the issues seem unrelated. Over the weekend, Twitter limited the number of tweets users were allowed to look at per day, rendering the service almost unusable. Musk said it was a necessary response to “data scraping” and “system manipulation.” However, most IT experts agreed the rate limiting was more likely a crisis response to technical problems born of mismanagement, incompetence, or both. Twitter did not answer Gizmodo’s questions on the subject.

On Reddit, the effect of API changes was particularly noisy. Reddit is essentially run by unpaid moderators who keep the forums healthy. Mods of large subreddits tend to rely on third-party tools for their work, tools that are built on now inaccessible APIs. That sparked a mass protest, where moderators essentially shut Reddit down. Though the controversy is still playing out, it’s likely to have permanent consequences as spurned moderators hang up their hats.

 

[Otterly]

If, you as an individual, are "of interest" to a government apparatus, then everything changes.

Thanks for the detailed answer. I would be extremely surprised if I was. Having said that, I would imagine everyone’s got a file, which is tagged with a risk level, and merely looking some places gets you moved up a rung. Like circles of surveillance hell, as it were.
You also never know if the people within that apparatus have their own agenda. So for example I would hope that GCHQ et al are looking for people who present a physical danger to the British public. Bombers, terrorists, people looking to kill and maim and disrupt infrastructure. BUT - we’ve just seen this last week in our press how the troons have infested middle management in the banks to the point that people who say men can’t be women are being denied banking. If they’re in banking they’re in intelligence too, and they’re certainly in the wider apparatus that feeds the info to the Eye. We also had on mumsnet a while back troons attempting to get the courts to force the team to hand over user data so they could dox users. These weren’t women doing anything other than objecting to trannies. But that’s enough to make you a target.
So it seems wise to just have one internet presence that’s incredibly boring and do anything else under a little more of a cloak.
Which is of course utterly insane, because I am NOT a danger to anyone at all and I doubt many here are. I just like to shoot the breeze here and I don’t think humans can change sex or that people should groom children.

If you're just shitposting on a drama site LARPing as some internet meme, just practice good browser and email sanitation,

Yes, that’s the bracket I fall under. I never log in anywhere with the Facebook/google etc options (always found that a very odd thing to do.) if I’m on here I’m using tor and I think I will be even when we go back to clearnet. All passwords are long and different. Any emails used here are used nowhere else.
What a crazy world we live in. So much resource devoted to wrongthink that should be used to pick up people who are planning Very Bad Things. But then the very bad things allow the Eye to have even more power dont they? So I do wonder how much is allowed to happen. If I was intelligence, and I was told to concentrate on wrongthink rather than bombers, I’d be examining my conscience

 

[The Ghost of Kviv]

Thanks for the detailed answer. I would be extremely surprised if I was. Having said that, I would imagine everyone’s got a file, which is tagged with a risk level, and merely looking some places gets you moved up a rung. Like circles of surveillance hell, as it were.

Yes, everyone's on a list. If you've done absolutely nothing wrong-been a boring law abiding citizen-someone in your familial, friendship, aquaintenceship or physical sphere has not. Thanks to the Patriot Act, and the various forms it has taken in countries accross the globe, you cannot escape the list. However, you aren't "of interest", you are not important enough for various governments to dedicate human resources to finding out more about you.

Intelligence is grouped into two categories, HUMINT and SIGINT. HUMINT is what has been carried out for eons, SIGINT is fairly new. However, due to the internet, SIGINT is orders of magnitude cheaper than HUMINT. Snowden showed us in the mid 00's, the NSA was able to keep a 30-day rolling image of the entire internet. I'd wager that cost has only reduced with the explosion the internet has seen since the iPhone. They don't need to keep a backup of every packet you've sent, just the metadata, which is a few words in a CSV.

SIGINT cannot find all the minute details about you, and can easily miss relationships obvious to us in the physical world, which is why when a person becomes "of interest", they are subjected to HUMINT. Humans are incredibly expensive, we require a lot of resources to run efficiently and without error. As such, there is an immense pressure through the system and the circumstances it operates under, to have a near-100% success rate when humans are involved in efforts deemed to be of great importance. An entire genre of books have been written to document the warped mental contortions and judicial proceedings that have resulted from that pressure.

You also never know if the people within that apparatus have their own agenda. So for example I would hope that GCHQ et al are looking for people who present a physical danger to the British public. Bombers, terrorists, people looking to kill and maim and disrupt infrastructure. BUT - we’ve just seen this last week in our press how the troons have infested middle management in the banks to the point that people who say men can’t be women are being denied banking. If they’re in banking they’re in intelligence too, and they’re certainly in the wider apparatus that feeds the info to the Eye.

Two things. Firstly, middle management is usually the weakest link in an organization, the first to corrupt and the first to go when genuine efforts are made to reform the organization. Trannies make line go up, so trannies get hired, paraded around, and be given the social equivalent of the TV remote. When line go down, the execs and money that gave the trannies a platform aren't going to be happy when they see a correlation between their stupidity and the line going down. Second, deviancy and child-like behaviours are only tolerated as long as the populace is happily destracted, and doesn't feel the impact at home. Every generation has their own version of such behaviour. Once the trannies start enforcing their un-developed social expectations on people as a whole, and it starts hitting them where it hurts, there'll be outrage and the social pendulum will start swinging in yet another perpendicular direction. Yes, everyone's being gaslit by the media and the system, but gaslighting only works as long as the distraction works, there's always a limit.

Which is of course utterly insane, because I am NOT a danger to anyone at all and I doubt many here are. I just like to shoot the breeze here and I don’t think humans can change sex or that people should groom children.

During Obama's term, the FBI has what was coined the six-week cycle. Approximately every six weeks, the FBI would trot out another Mohammad around the media block, claiming they disrupted yet another attack. I don't mean to say such people don't exist. But that the FBI was incentivized to create the person in a manner that was beneficial to their existence. People caught on, so they had to change the coat of paint on their schemes, right now it's "white supremacy".

Such actions are not helpful and, in many cases, caused the targeted group to walk further away from social cohesion. As much as many on this part of the farms like to believe, there are many things we hold in common accross peoples and races. The more genuine efforts we make to build individual relationships on those common grounds, the less power the system, the powerful, and the trannies will have over us. That's a grassroots effort and won't (shouldn't) be visible when looking from the top.

So don't become terrified or angry, you're succumbing to their whims by doing so. Document, and snicker at their stupidity. But talk with those around you, they're going to agree with a lot of what you have to say, even about trannies. Galileo didn't lay down and stop working when the Church arrested him, and he changed the world.

 

[Nopenopenope]

Scrape this- Niggerfaggot