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Ask Microsoft: Are you using our personal data to train AI?

foundation.mozilla.org

41–50 of 164 posts

Re: Ask Microsoft: Are you using our personal data to train AI?

#41
If they don't explicitly say in the ToS that they aren't going to use it in any particular way, then you can be sure that they are if there is potential for commercial gain.

Even if they do explicitly say that they aren't going to use it, I'm going to be sceptical. There will be a nice pile of caveats and exclusions within the legalese, and if not they might just use it anyway and hope they can afford to ride out any resulting legal action if people notice.

Re: Ask Microsoft: Are you using our personal data to train AI?

#42
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> then in my opinion a court should step in and declare it void so that Microsoft isn't allowed to use any private data until they get their act together. I hear what you're driving at, but "a court" cannot be both prosecutor and judge at the same time. This page is about that, possibly starting a civil suit to have a judge look at this and act accordingly.

The true failure is government. Mozilla shouldn’t have to lead this. The prosecutor should be the regulator.

America reaps what America sows.

Re: Ask Microsoft: Are you using our personal data to train AI?

#43
post #17

If nine experts in privacy can't understand what Microsoft does with your data, then in my opinion a court should step in and declare it void so that Microsoft isn't allowed to use any private data until they get their act together. If it's so vague that it becomes meaningless that should default to granting no rights. Otherwise, why not publish your all-rights-granting privacy policy in Klingonian in a locked drawer…

To an extent, think about vested interests here. Mozilla has little to gain by showcasing how clear a rival's new service agreement is! The AI services section seems pretty clear in terms of limiting the use cases of user content: "iv. Use of Your Content. As part of providing the AI services, Microsoft will process and store your inputs to the service as well as output from the service, for purposes of monitoring fo…

That paragraph says some things that they can do. It in no way says they won't use your content for AI training and any number of other things.

Mozilla's point is that the whole document is sufficiently vague that they could use it to defend pretty much whatever use of your content that conceive of now or in the near future.

Re: Ask Microsoft: Are you using our personal data to train AI?

#44
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To an extent, think about vested interests here. Mozilla has little to gain by showcasing how clear a rival's new service agreement is! The AI services section seems pretty clear in terms of limiting the use cases of user content: "iv. Use of Your Content. As part of providing the AI services, Microsoft will process and store your inputs to the service as well as output from the service, for purposes of monitoring fo…

That paragraph says some things that they can do. It in no way says they won't use your content for AI training and any number of other things. Mozilla's point is that the whole document is sufficiently vague that they could use it to defend pretty much whatever use of your content that conceive of now or in the near future.

Why would they single out those specific uses then, if you consider express prohibitions are necessary?

Re: Ask Microsoft: Are you using our personal data to train AI?

#45
>and none of our experts could tell if Microsoft plans on using your personal data to train its AI models

This means nothing. You don't know if someone is going to do something unless they say they are going to do it. No one knows if Bethesda is going to take down every video of Starfield on Youtube tomorrow that is monetized with ads. Sure you can speculate what someone will do, but you will never know for sure.

Re: Ask Microsoft: Are you using our personal data to train AI?

#46

This has been my objection to Microsoft's maze-like privacy policies for a long time. I once asked - on another forum and before the recent "AI" coding assistants were widely available - whether Microsoft's privacy policy allowed them to upload and do things with your own code if you used VS Code with telemetry enabled. At the time I was downvoted to invisibility and told I was being silly. But not one person showed…

> But not one person showed me anywhere in Microsoft's terms or privacy policy wording that limited

These policies don't exist to tell you what they are limiting themselves to. These documents exist as a defence to use against you (because you agreed to the policy by continuing to use their services) if you try to stop them doing something.

Unless for some reason there is commercial or legal advantage in saying “we will not to X”, a large company will never knowingly impose such limits on itself.

Re: Ask Microsoft: Are you using our personal data to train AI?

#48
post #12

How does M$'s legal team accomplish such a feat? Are there layers of linguistic abstraction built up such that only a sufficiently large team (Microsoft, grand jury) has the bandwidth to extract any meaning? Red herrings with gotchas hidden in seemingly innocuous places? Do they just talk in circles and never give an exact answer?

Past a certain number of millions of dollars, a team of lawyer is effectively a legal red team who is tasked with finding bypasses (and will find them) around the restrictions in place.

Re: Ask Microsoft: Are you using our personal data to train AI?

#49
So much of modern technology is a trojan horse these days. This is basically the enshittification of cloud services. Just a few years ago people would say you were being a little paranoid if you were worried about your data passing through company's servers unencrypted, but here we are now.

If companies do start training models on what people consider to be private documents, then the issues we already have with AI taking the jobs and purposes of humans is going to become significantly worse.

Scientists working on papers will essentially not be able to trust that their work won't get out before they have published it. A competing research team, asking prompts in the right way, could chance upon a reply that gives them a clue as to what the other team have found or are doing. The same goes for competing companies and engineering teams. Or authors writing the next book in a series. Other people using that trained data could produce a cheap rip-off of that next paper, patent, book using AI.

And that will completely demotivate humans to actually do stuff. Because what's the point? No one will pay you for it, and a poor quality second rate product is obtainable much cheaper.

At that point I think we'll discover what the real limitations of AI are, as we, as a society, have to get used to using it over humans. And I somehow doubt we will be better off.

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