Further Thoughts on Google Bard Extensions, Privacy Harms & Unanswered Questions
Where I try to piece together what Google's inner corporate thoughts might be.
// I dumped a few thoughts on LinkedIn earlier this week, but also wanted to cross-post and supplement here.
So Google is trying to push its ChatGPT competitor Bard hard with the one big competitive advantage it has over OpenAI — access to all our sweet, sweet personal data, including our emails and Drive-stored documents. This Verge piece discusses some of the promise, but it left me with many questions and concerns about consent, copyright, trade secret, privacy, and autonomy perspective.
To their credit, Google has done a decent job explaining how enabling Extensions in Bard will work, the benefits of using Bard with Extensions enabled, how users can enable and disable Extensions access, how they can manually delete data, and what details Google and human reviewers will have access to. But, as is the case for most BigTech, the company does a shit job at making these details easily findable. Most of the relevant information a user might need is scattered across multiple pages which …
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