Thank you Mozilla.
Ask Microsoft: Are you using our personal data to train AI?
121–130 of 164 posts
Re: Ask Microsoft: Are you using our personal data to train AI?
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
For US companies registered in Delaware (which is most of them), the doctrine of shareholders primacy holds. Shareholders can and have sued corporate boards/execs for not acting in their best interest. It goes back to the 1910s when Henry Ford very loudly and explicitly announced he was cutting shareholder dividends to pay workers the famous $5/day wage (double what any other factory workers were paid), and minority…
> Shareholders can and have sued corporate boards/execs for not acting in their best interest. Translating "best interest" to "maximize profits" is the stretch though. The shareholders define what is their best interest. Shareholders aren't faceless demons. They are you and me.
have you ever seen a shareholder that doesnt like a monopoly, winner-takes-all investment? this is the wet dream of investors.
ensuring the system does not degenerate is the job of regulators.
Re: Ask Microsoft: Are you using our personal data to train AI?
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don't even know why I should care. If MS crawl some web pages I've written and AI gets slightly smarter by reading them Crawling public web pages is a separate issue⁰ – by putting something online you aren't explicitly agreeing to any of MS's policies, at least in the eyes of the law. This is the same for anyone crawling public content not just MS. This privacy policy covers all the content you might use MS apps…
> If you don't use any MS products or services, and no products/services you do use are backed by MS's services, then you don't need to care personally. I beg to differ, wouldn't they be more inclined to care in case their data was being used in a product they do not interact with, rather than the one they do use - and in some way benefit from it?
That is a huge grey area of indirect use/agreement. If they don't interact with those services than someone else has given MS the data so from MS's PoV someone else has agreed to the policy and from the users PoV someone else has perhaps given their data to MS without permission. So yes, a concern, but not necessarily one relating to this policy except any clauses it has about removing data and its use when they are informed they shouldn't have it.
Re: Ask Microsoft: Are you using our personal data to train AI?
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don't even know why I should care. If MS crawl some web pages I've written and AI gets slightly smarter by reading them Crawling public web pages is a separate issue⁰ – by putting something online you aren't explicitly agreeing to any of MS's policies, at least in the eyes of the law. This is the same for anyone crawling public content not just MS. This privacy policy covers all the content you might use MS apps…
I do use MS services. I still don't understand why I should care unless the AI starts simply repeating my private data in response to questions. Now you could argue, what if I have documents with secret ideas or valuable IP that I don't want the AI to helpfully explain to others? That's definitely a valid concern! But for consumer uses, if it learns to draw better hands by looking at my holiday photos or whatever, th…
> unless the AI starts simply repeating my private data in response to questions
That is a concern some have, particularly around CoPilot and the fact it has been trained with much copy-left covered code in public repositories.
They assure us that it is not possible for blocks of code to be regurgitated that would break things like *GPL, but they have yet to explain why, if that assurance is 100% definitely true, they have not included any of their private code in the training set. Surely they consider that their code is of good quality and would be valuable to include in the model.
> if it learns to draw better hands by looking at my holiday photos or whatever, then I don't see the problem
And if it gives an advertising firm working for a product you'd rather not be associated with an image of a family that look _very_ like yours? Again, the same assurance is given as per CoPilot, but again not everyone is assured by the assurance.
And of course it could happen anyway by chance even if your family is not in the training set. I don't not bother to lock my doors because someone with a good lock-pick could get in anyway.
And they are not doing it because of a great communal benefit (well, their individual coders may be, but the company certainly isn't), they are doing it for commercial benefit. I'd prefer they didn't with my data, or if they do I'd like my slice however small thankyouverymuch.*
Re: Ask Microsoft: Are you using our personal data to train AI?
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
"An activist shareholder is a shareholder who uses an equity stake in a corporation to put pressure on its management" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Activist_shareholder I am not excusing greed. I am just saying that if shareholders are focused on financial gain the corporate management is obliged to deliver. Not all shareholders are greedy. But overwhelmingly they are.
> An activist shareholder is a shareholder who uses an equity stake in a corporation to put pressure on its management Would you be surprised to learn that there are shareholder groups that use their equity claims to pursue environmental, DEI or other goals that benefit society? > Not all shareholders are greedy. But overwhelmingly they are. Not even close. The vast majority of shareholders own stock through ETFs and…
I am quite aware of impact investors, ESG etc. The space is full of convulsions and strife [1]. But its a different debate. The point I was trying to make is that corporate managers are legally controlled by shareholders, its not a myth.
Actually the difficulty with sustainable investments shows how difficult to rely on shareholder's values to goad corporates in the "right" direction: unless the risk is clear, present and impossible to disguise there is just enormous resistance to interfere with profitable opportunities.
Now in the context of digital information oligopolies good luck convincing shareholders that their big tech darlings are detrimental for the future of digital society.
[1] https://www.pionline.com/esg/blackrock-voted-against-record-...
Re: Ask Microsoft: Are you using our personal data to train AI?
#126How 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?
What is M$?
Microsoft.
Re: Ask Microsoft: Are you using our personal data to train AI?
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Shareholders can and have sued corporate boards/execs for not acting in their best interest. Translating "best interest" to "maximize profits" is the stretch though. The shareholders define what is their best interest. Shareholders aren't faceless demons. They are you and me.
have you ever seen a shareholder that doesnt like a monopoly, winner-takes-all investment? this is the wet dream of investors. ensuring the system does not degenerate is the job of regulators.
I think the point is that shareholders' preference isn't the legal standard. The board can make moves the shareholders absolutely hate and which lose money in the short-term, but as long as the board reasonably thinks it's in the shareholders best interest, they can't do anything about it legally. (Other than vote out the board over time.)
Of course, regulation is needed to stop a bad board.
Re: Ask Microsoft: Are you using our personal data to train AI?
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
It still contains the sentence “to improve Microsoft products and services, you grant to Microsoft a worldwide and royalty-free intellectual property license to use Your Content.” The only explicit limitation is asserted with respect to targeted advertising: “We do not use what you say in email, chat, video calls or voice mail, or your documents, photos or other personal files, to target advertising to you.” The Summ…
Training a Microsoft AI could quite literally be considered ‘improving Microsoft products and services’.
Precisely - and there are at least two problems (for the end user) here:
Firstly, the subordinate clause ("to improve Microsoft products and services...") does not impose any constraint on what is actually being granted here ("you grant to Microsoft a worldwide and royalty-free intellectual property license to use Your Content") - the end user is granting nothing less than they would be if the subordinate clause were not there.
Secondly, there is no suggestion that the "improvements" will benefit the end user. It is, of course, entirely possible that the user's content could be used to benefit other users of Microsoft's products and services in a way that is detrimental to the owner/provider of that content.
If the subordinate clause has any purpose other than to suggest to the end user that Microsoft is imposing a benign and reasonable demand here, I do not see it.
Re: Ask Microsoft: Are you using our personal data to train AI?
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
we are all cogs in the machine. maybe decades ago the stance of individuals could have made a difference but nowadays its clear that it no longer does. there is a collectively created monster that can only be tamed by something of equivalent and greater collective power: radical government regulation. The EU is doing its part. The US isnt. imho nothing was learned from the previous Microsoft monopoly era. Information…
I think personal action can still make a difference. What if we were to develop a coalition of people that believed in that, sort of like a union for a healthy society? The coalition would have a common set of standards and ethics, which would include the development of more community-based standards for technology. With such a coalition, we could create our own technology not in the hands of technology companies, an…
Go on, attempt to form that coalition....
And the next thing you know you'll be on every major news network as a "Communist anti-technology union group looking to hold the US back"
The US has a brutal history of stamping out unions, do you think you're just going to form this group unopposed without massive amounts of money and resistance looking to stamp out your very existence?
Re: Ask Microsoft: Are you using our personal data to train AI?
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
I blame the tech companies but I also blame the people who created all this stuff -- programmers, tech startups, and computer science. Those people created a system that is too easy to use as an ultra-efficient wealth concentrator, and now tech companies are the result.
we are all cogs in the machine. maybe decades ago the stance of individuals could have made a difference but nowadays its clear that it no longer does. there is a collectively created monster that can only be tamed by something of equivalent and greater collective power: radical government regulation. The EU is doing its part. The US isnt. imho nothing was learned from the previous Microsoft monopoly era. Information…
the claim 'I was only following orders' has been used to justify too many tragedies in our history.