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Class-Action Lawsuit Says Google Stole Everyone’s Data to Train Its AI
Google got smacked with a class-action lawsuit Tuesday accusing the search giant of “stealing everything ever shared on the internet,” including copyrighted works and millions of people’s personal data. The law firm behind the case, Clarkson, said the case comes after Google changed its AI privacy policy, an update first spotted by Gizmodo. The company changed its policy to say it reserves the right to scrape all the internet’s public information to fuel its artificial intelligence projects.
“Google 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,” said Ryan Clarkson, managing partner of Clarkson, in a press release. “We have only recently learned that Google has been taking everything ever created or shared online by millions of internet users, including all our personal information, creative works, and professional works, and using all of that data to train and build commercial AI Products.”
The case comes after a nearly identical lawsuit against OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, which was filed by the same firm. Chatbots like ChatGPT and Google’s Bard, not to mention countless other AI endeavors, are trained on the mountains of public information scraped off the internet. Companies like Google feed the data into their AI systems, and the AI produces “new” content based on what it learns.
So far, it’s up for debate, but the complaint says Google broke copyright law and collected people’s personal information without consent. The plaintiffs, known only by their initials in the lawsuit, include a New York Times best-selling author, a six-year-old boy, a software developer, a TikTok influencer, an actor, and several others.
Tax Prep Companies Shared Private Taxpayer Data With Google and Meta for Years, Congressional Probe Finds
Some of America’s largest tax-prep companies have spent years sharing Americans’ sensitive financial data with tech titans including Meta and Google in a potential violation of federal law — data that in some cases was misused for targeted advertising, according to a seven-month congressional investigation.
The report highlights what legal experts described to CNN as a “five-alarm fire” for taxpayer privacy that could lead to government and private lawsuits, criminal penalties or perhaps even a “mortal blow” for some industry giants involved in the probe including TaxSlayer, H&R Block and TaxAct.
Using visitor tracking technology embedded on their websites, the three tax-prep companies allegedly sent tens of millions of Americans’ personal information to the tech industry without consent or appropriate disclosures, according to the congressional report reviewed by CNN.
Beyond ordinary personal data such as people’s names, phone numbers and email addresses, the list of information shared also included taxpayer data — details about people’s filing status, adjusted gross income, the size of their tax refunds and even information about the buttons and text fields they clicked on while filling out their tax forms, which could reveal what tax breaks they may have claimed or which government programs they use, according to the report.
Discord Bans Teen Dating Servers and AI-Generated Child Sex Abuse Material
Discord is making major changes to its child safety policies, banning teen dating and artificial intelligence-generated child sex images. The platform, known to be popular amongst gamers, came under scrutiny last month after an NBC investigation found that child exploitation, extortion, and grooming were taking place rampantly on the site.
Now, the hub is specifically banning AI-created content that sexualizes children in any way, also doing so for text-based depictions. In a blog post, Discord said this their Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) policy has expanded to include “any text or media content that sexualizes children, including drawn, photorealistic, and AI-generated photorealistic child sexual abuse material.”
The platform has also now explicitly banned any servers dedicated to dating amongst teens, and has said that any user under the age of 18 cannot send or access any sexually explicit material. When it comes to the dating policy, the company said that “dating online can result in self-endangerment.”
Discord’s guidelines had already stated that the company would remove any spaces that “encourage or facilitate dating between teens,” but this has been clarified further. In addition, older teens who attempt to or engage in the grooming of a younger teen will be placed under review and actioned under Discord’s Inappropriate Sexual Conduct with Children and Grooming Policy.
Biden Reveals He’s Got No Defense for His Censorship Campaign
On Monday, President Joe Biden played his cards. He’s all bluff, no aces. Biden is the defendant in a lawsuit that accuses him and his team of, in Federal District Court Judge Terry Doughty’s words, “the most massive attack against free speech in the United States.”
Yet the appeal Biden filed Monday is devoid of even one convincing argument in his own defense. Count on the appeal to go nowhere. Biden’s been caught red-handed violating the Constitution.
On July 4, Doughty announced that the evidence produced so far indicates the president is operating a vast, illegal censorship scheme to muzzle his critics. Doughty knows tyranny when he sees it: He’s got the goods on the Biden administration, and he laid out his evidence in 155 pages, all meticulously footnoted.
Biden, numerous White House staff and employees of 11 federal agencies are being sued for operating a whole-of-government censorship operation to prevent you — the public — from seeing social-media postings that challenge Biden policies on issues like vaccines, climate change, inflation and more.
Maine Proposes Dropping COVID Vaccine Mandate for Healthcare Workers
Portland Press Herald reported:
The Maine Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) is proposing that the COVID-19 vaccine be removed from the list of required immunizations for healthcare workers. The department says the vaccination remains an important tool to protect public health, but that the requirement for healthcare workers achieved the intended benefit of savings lives, protecting healthcare capacity and limiting the spread of the virus during the height of the pandemic.
Maine is one of four remaining states with some type of COVID-19 vaccine requirement in place. The decision was welcomed by hospitals and other healthcare providers hit by worker shortages during the pandemic.
The vaccination requirement for healthcare workers went into effect on Oct. 20, 2021. Healthcare workers upset by the requirement sued the state, arguing that it was their religious right to refuse the vaccine because of their belief that fetal stem cells from abortions are used to develop the vaccines.
DHHS expects the rule will be published next Wednesday and be adopted by the end of the year following public comment. The department said it will exercise enforcement discretion regarding COVID-19 vaccination of healthcare workers during the rulemaking process.
Studies Describe Pandemic’s Lasting Influence on Children
From school closures to delays in routine immunizations, the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on children are far-reaching.
Two new studies describe how Japanese children exposed to the first 2 years of the pandemic show developmental delays and note that 28% of U.S. kids had delayed or missed preventive care visits due to COVID-19, with variations by race and ethnicity.
In the first study, published yesterday in JAMA Pediatrics, researchers compared developmental outcomes at age 3 or 5 years between Japanese nursery student cohorts who were exposed to the pandemic during the follow-up with a cohort who was not.
When comparing children from before the pandemic to those exposed to the pandemic, the authors found that 3-year-olds did not have delays on the KIDS scale, but 5-year-olds exposed to the pandemic were on average 4.39 months behind in overall development compared with a cohort of 5-year-olds before 2020.
Elon Musk Forms New AI Company, With Researchers From Google, OpenAI
Twitter owner Elon Musk formally announced his new artificial intelligence company, xAI, on a new website Wednesday, officially marking his entry into the race to build supersmart computers that might take over tasks from humans.
Musk has talked about xAI for months and registered a new company with that name in Nevada in March. On Wednesday, he unveiled a team of eleven employees, drawn from OpenAI, DeepMind and the University of Toronto, a center of academic AI research. The company is separate from Twitter and Musk’s other companies SpaceX and Tesla, but would work closely with them, according to the site.
