Google

TL;DR

• Google has updated its privacy policy.
• The new policy adds that Google can use publically available data to train its AI products.
• The way the policy is worded, it sounds as if the company is reserving the right to harvest and use data posted anywhere on the web.

You probably didn’t notice, but Google quietly updated its privacy policy over the weekend. While the wording of the policy is only slightly different from before, the change is enough to be concerning.

As discovered by Gizmodo, Google has updated its privacy policy. While there’s nothing particularly notable in most of the policy, one section now sticks out — the research and development section. That section explains how Google can use your information and now reads as:

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.

Before the update, this section mentioned “for language models” instead of “AI models.” It also only mentioned Google Translate, where it now adds Bard and Cloud AI.

As the outlet points out, this is a peculiar clause for a company to add. The reason why it’s peculiar is that the way it’s worded makes it sound as if the tech giant reserves the right to harvest and use data from any part of the public internet. Usually, a policy such as this only discusses how the company will use data posted on its own services.

While most people likely realize that whatever they put online will be publicly available, this development opens up a new twist — use. It’s not just about others being able to see what you write online, but also about how that data will be used.

Bard, ChatGPT, Bing Chat, and other AI models that provide real-time information work by scraping information from the internet. The sourced information can often come from others’ intellectual property. Right now, there are lawsuits accusing these AI tools of theft, and there are likely to be more to come down the line.----

On Friday afternoon, Twitter decided to block unregistered, signed-out users, from seeing public tweets. That meant that for Google's normal crawling purposes, it was unable to see some of these tweets. It seems that Google now has about 52% fewer Twitter URLs in its index today than it had on Friday, just a few days later.

While we know the site command is not the most accurate measure of what Google has indexed, we don't have many other free tools to measure how many pages Google indexed of a site that we do not have Search Console level access to. So I decided to screen capture how many pages Google indexed of Twitter.com on Friday, right after the block started.

On Friday, June 30th at about 1pm ET, Twitter had 471 million URLs indexed in Google Search according to this site command:

Then yesterday, July 2nd, I snapped another screenshot and Google had 34% fewer URLs indexed, 309 million, that is 162 million fewer URLs indexed:

Then this morning, I grabbed another screenshot, and it was down now to 227 million URLs indexed, that is about 52% less than what was indexed on Friday:

Now, we know Google has access to the Twitter firehose, which is why we see Google still showing recent tweets in the Twitter Google Search carousel:

But for normal indexing of these Twitter URLs, it seems like these tweets are dropping out of the sky.

Twitter URLs indexed by Friday to today went from about 471 million URLs to 227 million, a drop of about 52%. I wonder what type of impact this has on its traffic from Google Search, if any.

Forum discussion at Twitter.