Google sued in the U.S. over data scraping for AI
The HinduGoogle is facing a class action lawsuit filed by eight plaintiffs in the U.S., who accused the search engine giant of stealing the creations of “hundreds of millions of Americans” to build products like the AI-powered chatbot Bard. According to the court filing dated July 11, the plaintiffs claimed that Google stole their data such as personal and professional content, photos, and emails over the course of years without gaining consent from users. “As part of its theft of personal data, Google illegally accessed restricted, subscription based websites to take the content of millions without permission and infringed at least 200 million materials explicitly protected by copyright, including previously stolen property from websites known for pirated collections of books and other creative works,” said the court filing, adding that Bard would not exist without such “mass theft.” Some of the plaintiffs in the case are an investigative journalist and author, an actor and professor, a six-year-old child, and a young teenager. Calling the claims “baseless,” Google general counsel Halimah DeLaine Prado 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.