‘It does not own the internet’: Lawsuit accuses Google of ‘secretly stealing’ people's data to train AI products

A new lawsuit has claimed that Google has been "secretly stealing everything ever created and shared on the internet by hundreds of millions of Americans" to train its generative AI products, such as its chatbot Bard. The proposed class-action lawsuit was filed by Clarkson Law Firm in the US District Court for the Northern District of California on Tuesday, July 11. It alleged that Google, along with AI sister company DeepMind, and parent company Alphabet, accessed people’s data without consent.

The lawsuit says, "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 footprint" to build its AI products.” It added, "For years, Google harvested this data in secret, without notice or consent from anyone."

The data allegedly accessed was reportedly taken from subscription-based websites. It was also allegedly obatined from websites known for pirated books. The complaint cited that as per an update to Google's privacy policy from July 1, it may gather information that is "publicly available online". This data would subsequently be used for training its AI models, as well as for building 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.

Google general counsel Halimah DeLaine Prado told the outlet Insider that Google had been "clear for years" that it used data from public sources. He said the company used data that is published to the open web and public datasets "responsibly and in line with our AI Principles." "American law supports using public information to create new beneficial uses, and we look forward to refuting these baseless claims," Halimah said.

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