Monday, July 3rd 2023
Google Will Use Your Data to Train Their AI According to Updated Privacy Policy
Google made a small but important change to their privacy policy over the weekend that effectively lays claim to anything you post publicly online for use to train their AI models. The original wording of the section of their privacy policy claimed that public data would be used for business purposes, research, and for improving Google Translate services. Now however the section has been updated to read the following:
The new change has already gone into effect as of July 1st, 2023. Given the scope and longevity of Google accounts (think how long some people have had Gmail and YouTube accounts) this change now formally includes an incredibly vast amount of public interaction data stretched over decades. What is still uncertain is whether those individuals that have committed to "de-Googling" their online lives could be caught up in the dragnet of Google's data scraping regardless of whether they've agreed to this policy change, or if simply having any contact with Google over the years is enough. Large-scale public scraping has already been happening regardless of individual consent with other large language training models, such as OpenAI's ChatGPT. Ideally though this change affects only those whom have active accounts with various Google services. One important point to be made is that Google does not mention anything about using private data, and such data shared with Google is apparently safe from being ingested into the AI machine. For now.
Sources:
Gizmodo, Google
Google uses information to improve our services and to develop new products, features and technologies that benefit our users and the public. For example, we use publicly available information to help train Google's AI models and build products and features like Google Translate, Bard, and Cloud AI capabilities.Further down in the policy text Google has another section which exemplifies the areas of "publicly available" information they seek to scrape,
For example, we may collect information that's publicly available online or from other public sources to help train Google's AI models and build products and features like Google Translate, Bard, and Cloud AI capabilities. Or, if your business's information appears on a website, we may index and display it on Google services.
34 Comments on Google Will Use Your Data to Train Their AI According to Updated Privacy Policy
Still, whether using Bard or Translate, I wouldn't copy/paste their output without proofreading.
Thats why people like me want pagination, my desktop isnt a phone.
Two issues of top of my head, is scrolling endlessly can lead to large resource usage as the page size just keeps growing and what happens if you want to skip to e.g.l page 50 without pagination?
Practical example, search for something, do maybe 5 page scroll cycles (equivalent of page 5 pagination) then load a link, click back, you not back to where you were but instead start of scroll, on pagination you back to the page you was on. Pagination is just flat out superior hence it was the logical evolution of desktop UI design, infinite scroll was developed for phones with devs then not wanting to maintain two UI's dumping it on desktop users.
Youtube search is awful now with no pagination, gave up on it once they dumped it. Try finding oldest video from a youtuber with 1000s of videos easily without pagination and now without the order by oldest first option which also got removed.
PDF method might be a reasonable compromise, it combines pagination with infinite scrolling, as most office type apps do. So if a browser auto changed its URL allowing you to skip back to where you are as it scrolls, and to manage resource usage actively shrink the page, I have seen some websites work by when you scroll down it just loads next page so pagination controlled via scrolling (or click), thats probably the best hybrid solution on the web.
Endless scroll doesn't mean you keep everything in memory, endless scroll also does pagination behind the scenes. When it detects you have scrolled towards the edge of your page, it retrieves the next one. And since it uses pagination, there's no reason it won't generate anchors so that you can return to your previous scroll position.
Proper handling of the "back" action is a generic problem of SPAs, it's not specific to pagination or endless scroll.
For me the best use case I have seen on scroll to proceed mechanisms is when its pagination but scrolling down puts you on next page (foreground pagination not behind the scenes anchors) or simply have an option so the end user can choose what they what, that is likely the best of both worlds, but sadly it isnt very common place. I think we both said our piece here so I will leave it at that for me.
You are welcome to explain to me why you think its a bad idea not to have pagination as an option or a hybrid solution, but I probably wont reply and just read it as we drifting off topic.
But I did not say it should be everywhere, I was curious why you got riled up about the change, since, imho, endless scrolling is the superior solution. You have explained that: the implementation you're looking at got the back button wrong. That's reason enough for me.