Recently, Twitter (now X) made headlines when its privacy policy update caught many of its users off guard and left many unclear and worried.
Bloomberg made waves after discovering a subtle but subtle alteration to X's privacy policy, an alteration that passed many people by yet raised alarm among some observers.
Chanuka Nadun Perera
Bloomberg quickly made their concerns known upon closer examination; it revealed they were expanding data collection, including biometric information, as well as accessing users' job and education histories! But wait, there's more.
The policy change can be located in section 2.1 and is written as follows:
We may use the information we collect and publicly available information to help train our machine learning or artificial intelligence models for the purposes outlined in this policy.
At X, machine learning and AI remain integral parts of innovation. Their recent policy update sheds some light on their intentions: using data they collect along with publicly accessible information to supercharge their machine learning/AI models, something which unsurprisingly raised both eyebrows and questions among various stakeholder communities.
Chanuka Nadun Perera
Nonetheless, there remain several questions and issues associated with this revelation, prompting further inquiries and debate within society at large.
Although not a topic often discussed among peers, biometric systems play a vital role in modern digital life, serving as guardians to our online realm and using personal characteristics (known as biometric characteristics ) to verify and identify users, much like digital fingerprints do today.
Biometric characteristics offer us something even more striking. These remarkable human features range from fingerprints and facial features voice and vocal patterns, iris scans, palm prints, and hand geometry.
They represent our digital identities! When captured and aligned correctly by sophisticated systems, these biometric traits serve to verify and identify individuals with unparalleled precision.
Now, let's turn our focus back towards Alex Ivanovs, who has shown an uncanny knack for discovering hidden gems within X's policies, prompting questions as to its intentions and usage by its owner Elon Musk and involvement with xAI leading some observers to speculate whether or not X is serving as a goldmine of data for these AI endeavors, with recent tweets encouraging journalists covering it being one possible tactic used by Musk as part of an ambitious data gathering strategy?
Twitter has quickly become an arena for data disputes, with Musk becoming one of the key participants. He's been particularly vocal in criticizing xAI's plan to use public tweets as AI training data, something other tech companies use too, according to him.
Additionally, his potential lawsuit threat against Microsoft over mishandled data raises eyebrows. Nonetheless, one cannot dispute Musk's determination to collect as much as possible for large artificial intelligence language models.
Just public data, not DMs or anything private
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 31, 2023
Elon Musk put these fears to rest by clarifying X's plan of using only public data without using private messages (DMs or otherwise).
Ivanovs also brings our attention to xAI's homepage, which suggests collaborations with companies like Twitter and Tesla to further its mission. This indicates a deeper relationship between Twitter's data and that used by xAI for development purposes, suggesting it plays an instrumental role.
Sources: techcrunch.com
