Social network X (formerly Twitter) announced on Wednesday that, absent user opt-out, it would permit third-party “collaborators” to use X data to train their AI models. The company hadn’t changed its policy to say that its data may also be used by third parties, even though X owner Elon Musk trained xAI’s Grok AI chatbot on X user data, sparking an investigation by the EU’s top privacy regulator.
Read More From Tech News
The policy’s addition suggests that X is investigating data licensing to AI companies as a possible new source of income, similar to Reddit and other media companies.
The revised Privacy Policy’s “Sharing Information” section now includes a paragraph from X explaining how X user data may be used and how users can opt-out.
It reads:
Third parties that work together. Your information may be shared or disclosed to third parties based on your settings or if you choose to share it. If you decide not to opt-out, the recipients of the information may, in certain cases, use it for further independent purposes beyond those specified in X’s privacy policy, such as training their generative or other artificial intelligence models.
Read More From Cybersecurity
Although the policy directs users to X’s settings page, it does not mention where users would go to turn off data-sharing. Users can currently enable or disable data sharing with xAI’s Grok and other “business partners” through the “Privacy and Safety” section in settings. However, the latter are defined as businesses that X may collaborate with to “run and improve its products,” not other AI providers.
This could be because the opt-out option might be added after the revised privacy policy takes effect on November 15. (Hopefully.)
The company also deleted a paragraph that stated that it retains other “personally identifiable data we collect when you use our products and services for a maximum of 18 months” and user “profile information and content for the duration of your account.”
Read More From Software
Rather, the new section clarifies that X will retain various kinds of information for varying lengths of time, contingent on the length of time required to offer you our goods and services, to meet our legal obligations, and for security and safety purposes. It states, for instance, that usage data such as “content you post” and “interactions with other people’s content” will be retained for “the duration of your account or until such content is removed.”
Additionally, the policy included a reminder to users that even after being deleted from X, public content may still be found elsewhere. As X adds, search engines and other third parties may keep copies of your posts longer, depending on their privacy policies, even after they are deleted or expire on X. This could potentially cover the data’s ingestion by AI providers.
Read More From Brit News Hub
A separate clause in X’s revised Terms of Service, titled “Liquidated Damages,” states that any company that scrapes its content will be held accountable for damages. A fee of USD 15,000 will be imposed on the organization, according to X, “for requesting, viewing, or accessing more than 1,000,000 posts (including reply posts, video posts, image posts, and any other posts) in any 24 hours.”
The company needed new ways to pay its bills, so it decided to monetize X data in response to boycotts and advertiser withdrawals, as well as a subscription feature that hasn’t taken off.
