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

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

#61
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

To make it look, on cursory reading, like the policy is something you are comfortable to agree to. Legal theatre. Also because those specific uses are mentioned in existing law and/or have been otherwise successfully defended. It gives their lawyers as many explicit tools as possible, before they need to argue around the implicit ones enabled by their policies & agreements being deliberately more vague elsewhere. The…

Interesting! A rather cynical approach. Although preferable to naivety on my part - I'd expect a court to hold the list exhaustive if challenged.

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

#62
post #60

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…

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

#63
post #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 t…

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

#64

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…

The fact that phones eavesdrop on conversations and turn those into relevant ads within minutes is reason enough for me to believe that they will use the data regardless of what their privacy policy says.

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

#65

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…

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

#67
post #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.

Maybe governments should hire actual red teams to look for those loopholes.
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