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Ask HN: Does Google use the text inside gdocs and Gmail for training AI models?
Google searches = used for training AI models
Apple notes = private
Google docs = ?
Siri requests = used for training models
Emails you send in gmail = ?
I'm seeking to understand what things people might think are private, because they're not posted on the open web, but where they're used for training AI models.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- whalesalad 4y agoI wouldn't be surprised at all - gotta read the ToS. The entire reason Google went heavy on GMail, despite it being a fun 10% project initially, was so that they could read your messages and use it to send more targeted ads.
- refulgentis 4y agoThat’s not true as of several years ago, at this point. Just a meme
- lp0_on_fire 4y agoIt is a free product and we ALL know know how free products are "paid for".
- joshuamorton 4y agoYes. They Gmail shows ads. Those ads aren't related to the content inside Gmail.
- jeffbee 4y agoI imagine the ad revenue on gmail is trivial and it's just subsidized by Workspace revenue. Initially and possibly now it was/is subsidized by the incremental search quality enjoyed by logged-in users.
- lp0_on_fire 4y agoI'm position that the lawyers for Google have ensured that ads shown in Gmail don't relate to your email's content. Whether it's being scanned for other reasons is another question.
- behnamoh 4y agoWhy would it matter? If you're concerned about your privacy, there are millions of other reasons to avoid Google.
- BenjaminDyer 4y agoI would assume so, all email content is surfaced for serving ads, so why not AI training.
- jsnell 4y agoYour premise is incorrect: Email contents are not used for targeting ads.
- hungryforcodes 4y agoBut...how do you (we) know?
- jsnell 4y agoBecause they've made public statements to that effect, including in the privacy policy. Now, your next question is presumably going to be "why don't they just lie?". First, the lie would be very expensive. What do you think privacy regulators around the world would think of it? What do you think that lying to customers about how their data is used would do to the their $25 billion / year enterprise business? Second, the lie would get discovered very quickly, because somebody would leak it. Plenty of much less serious things seem to leak weekly. Third, there's very little to be gained by using the data and lying about this compared to the alternatives (say nothing; tell the truth; don't use the data). "Use the data but lie about it" is the absolute worst strategy possible.
- hungryforcodes 4y agoOk. I'm convinced! :)
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- BlueTemplar 4y agoEU Privacy Regulators already effectively made Google (and most other US companies) illegal 8 years ago, after Google et al. gave personal data away to the NSA in breach of EU's fundamental rights : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Schrems#Schrems_I https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Schrems#Schrems_I (You will notice that the enforcement has been very slow moving on that one, since despite this, US companies are still used quite a lot in EUrope.)
- mikek 4y agoEmail contents are used to generate a model for Smart Compose in Gmail [1]. I assume that Google docs works similarly. [1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1906.00080.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1906.00080.pdf
- cloudking 4y agoYes, in a similar way to using voice data from Android and Home devices to train speech-to-text models.
- askiiart 4y agoWell, since Google offers an auto complete AI, I'd assume any text Google has (or at the very least, text that can be auto-completed) gets fed into their AIs. I have no evidence for this, and I should really read the ToS sometimes, but I digress.
- jeffbee 4y agoThe Smart Compose paper does say that it was trained on user emails, and that each user gets a model trained for their personal style.
- manv1 4y agoGoogle says it doesn't use email text for targeting, but there are always "bugs."
- revskill 4y agoAnd bugs are features too.
- knaik94 4y agoNo it does not, it would be irresponsible to do that on private data. There's a very clear line between data posted publicly and data held privately, especially in terms of copyright. I doubt it will ever be default opt-in for something as sensitive e-mail and docs. One exception to that is scanning for CSAM and Terrorism and DMCA. And with DMCA, it's automated based on file hash, and you still maintain access to your files, you are just limited from sharing them. Ads in gmail aren't based on content, but other online activity while logged in. I think the other exception to that is smart compose. AI models do use email content for training data, but the output of those are strictly for use locally while writing emails. I imagine it's also siloed per user. EDIT: Not a google employee, I apologize if my assertions seem too strong. EDIT2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federated_learning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federated_learning "We have always maintained that you control your data and we process it according to the agreement(s) we have with you. Furthermore, we will not and cannot look at it without a legitimate need to support your use of the service -- and even then it is only with your permission. Here are some of the additional measures we take to ensure your privacy: (reference: GCP Terms). In addition to these commitments, for AI/ML development, we don’t use data that you provide us to train our own models without your permission. And if you want to work together to develop a solution using any of our AI/ML products, by default our teams will work only with data that you have provided and that has identifying information removed. We work with your raw data only with your consent and where the model development process requires it. " https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/google-cloud-unveils-ai-and-ml-privacy-commitment https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/g... https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6603?hl=en https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6603?hl=en https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.00080 https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.00080 https://ai.googleblog.com/2017/04/federated-learning-collaborative.html https://ai.googleblog.com/2017/04/federated-learning-collabo...
- belter 4y agoYou mentioned would be "irresponsible to do that on private data" but Google it seems were doing that, until at least 2017. Or I am incorrect about it? "Google Will Keep Reading Your Emails, Just Not for Ads" - https://variety.com/2017/digital/news/google-gmail-ads-emails-1202477321/ https://variety.com/2017/digital/news/google-gmail-ads-email... Edit: Updated comment. Misread it as being posted from somebody working at Google.
- CrypticShift 4y agoA related question: are the 40+ [1] millions Full Text Books used ? OpenAI is using book1 (BookCorpus ?) and book2 sources. By the number of tokens, this seems less than a million book in total. [1] https://www.blog.google/products/search/15-years-google-books/ https://www.blog.google/products/search/15-years-google-book...
- jll29 4y agoIt's "BooksCorpus" (with an 's'), a 800M word dataset described in Zhu et al. (2015) IEEE ICCV, and also available on AWS at: https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/prodview-d3ghxqzkitn6y https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/prodview-d3ghxqzkitn6y The Google BERT paper (Devlin et al., 2018) also references it: https://aclanthology.org/N19-1423/ https://aclanthology.org/N19-1423/ Privacy questions aside (as important as they of course are), it's very important to know what a model was trained on exactly: if Wikipedia was used in the training set, you can't use questions from Wikipedia to test it (as that would be cheating) - test data must be as "unseen" as a good exam.
- touringa 4y agoActually, it's 'BookCorpus'. OpenAI spelt it wrong in their GPT-1 paper. It has also been analyzed here and here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.05241 https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.05241 https://lifearchitect.ai/whats-in-my-ai/ https://lifearchitect.ai/whats-in-my-ai/
- advisedwang 4y agohttps://support.google.com/docs/answer/10381817 https://support.google.com/docs/answer/10381817 States: > Google Docs, Sheets, & Slides uses data to improve your experience > To provide services like spam filtering, virus detection, malware protection and the ability to search for files within your individual account, we process your content. So yes, they do use your data for things like training AI. However it does not seem to be for general AI like Bard but for ML systems within the product in question.
- dawnerd 4y agoWell, gets a bit muddy though if you factor in Workspace terms which offer a completely different set of processing agreements.
- londons_explore 4y agoWorkspace data is silo'd off and treated separately.
- guluarte 4y agogoogle uses all data it can for training their models, the only rule is the data should not track back to a specific user.
- moremetadata 4y agoCan you have anti-spam AI models?
- throwayyy479087 4y agoI'm not sure how else you'd do it at this point.
- rsync 4y agoA different question should be asked: Do their Terms of Service, etc., allow them to use that text for training models ?
- logicalmonster 4y agoCall me crazy, but I don't think I'd trust a company like Google to necessarily follow their own TOS, or to not try and craft a vague TOS that gives them a lot of legal flexibility to do most of what they want.
- Awelton 4y agoI don't know how everyone else approaches it, but I just assume that anything uploaded to googles servers will be snooped using some legal loophole or another. I don't have time to study the TOS for every user hostile application in the world, so guilty until proven innocent is the only sane position I can see to take.
- JohnFen 4y agoThis. And not just Google's servers, but anyone's servers.
- londons_explore 4y agoBig companies generally do stick to their ToS.
- TechBro8615 4y agoYes, and you know when they've stopped following it, because they send you an email saying "we've changed our ToS" [after our legal department learned what our engineers have been doing all year].
- consumer451 4y agoAfter Google wardrove the USA I permanently lost all faith. https://www.darkreading.com/risk/google-wardriving-how-engineering-trumped-privacy https://www.darkreading.com/risk/google-wardriving-how-engin... https://www.theregister.com/2019/07/23/google_wispy_payout/ https://www.theregister.com/2019/07/23/google_wispy_payout/
- Leeturtle 4y ago> Big companies generally do stick to their ToS. I am the co-founder of a small by design company offering cloud services, and we spend a lot of time to make sure that our ToS reflect what happens operationally. Also money since we review it with a lawyer specialised in open source software. There are some other entities from chatons.org that care about such documents as well.
- lern_too_spel 4y ago
- lofaszvanitt 4y agoThey are literally training their future enslaver.
- touringa 4y agoIf you're talking about Google Bard, they were very clear in the LaMDA 2 paper that they only used public sources. "...from public dialog data and other public web documents..." LaMDA 2 paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.08239 https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.08239 My overview of Google Bard including dataset: https://lifearchitect.ai/bard/ https://lifearchitect.ai/bard/ My overview of Google PaLM and Pathways family including dataset: https://lifearchitect.ai/pathways/ https://lifearchitect.ai/pathways/ Compare with other models including the use of DeepMind's MassiveWeb/MassiveText and EleutherAI's Pile dataset: https://lifearchitect.ai/whats-in-my-ai/ https://lifearchitect.ai/whats-in-my-ai/
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- kartayyar 4y agoAbout emails: No for ads. Yes for training models for Smart Reply, from: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1606.04870.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1606.04870.pdf Privacy Note that all email data (raw data, preprocessed data and training data) was encrypted. Engineers could only inspect aggregated statistics on anonymized sentences that occurred across many users and did not identify any user. Also, only frequent words are retained. As a result, verifying model’s quality and debugging is more complex.
- Berniek 4y agoAnd a related question is do any/all of these programs use other copyright material as their training data and is it a breach of copyright?
- ReflectedImage 4y agoIf they used text inside Google Docs for training AI models, they would leak confidential customer information in an incredibility obvious way. So I'm guessing no.