Google has been accused of stealing everything posted on the Internet

A new class-action lawsuit filed against Google alleges the company is “secretly stealing everything ever created and shared on the internet by hundreds of millions of Americans” to train its generative AI products, such as the chatbot Google Bard. This is reported by Insider.
In a class-action lawsuit filed by the Clarkson Law Firm in the US District Court for the Northern District of California on Tuesday, accused Google, AI sister company DeepMind, and parent company Alphabet of taking people’s data without their knowledge or consent.

“Google has taken all our personal and professional information, our creative and copywritten works, our photographs, and even our emails — virtually the entirety of our digital footprint” to build its AI products, the lawsuit claims.”For years, Google harvested this data in secret, without notice or consent from anyone.”

This includes data taken from subscription-based websites and from websites known for pirated collections of books and creative works, the lawsuit alleges.

The complaint also refers to an update to Google’s privacy policy from July 1, which says that it may collect information that’s “publicly available online” to train its AI models and build products like Google Translate, Bard, and Cloud AI capabilities.

“Google must understand, once and for all: it 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,” the lawsuit says. “‘Publicly available’ has never meant free to use for any purpose.”

The names of the plaintiffs have not been published, but they are known to include a New York Times bestselling author, a six-year-old boy, a software developer, a TikTok influencer, an actor, and several others.

The new lawsuit comes about two weeks after the same Clarkson Law Firm filed a similar complaint against OpenAI, alleging the company stole “massive amounts of personal data” and used it to train ChatGPT, including medical records and information about children.