6 ms·

To an extent, think about vested interests here. Mozilla has little to gain by showcasing how clear a rival's new service agreement is! The AI services section

by grabeh 3y ago

To an extent, think about vested interests here. Mozilla has little to gain by showcasing how clear a rival's new service agreement is! The AI services section seems pretty clear in terms of limiting the use cases of user content: "iv. Use of Your Content. As part of providing the AI services, Microsoft will process and store your inputs to the service as well as output from the service, for purposes of monitoring for and preventing abusive or harmful uses or outputs of the service." Admittedly, I haven't read other parts to understand the full picture though.

flakeoil 3y ago
If I understand the below correctly then it seems they can use your data for whatever purpose they want. Also training AI even though it does not explicitly say so. "2b. To the extent necessary to provide the Services to you and others, to protect you and the Services, and to improve Microsoft products and services, you grant to Microsoft a worldwide and royalty-free intellectual property license to use Your Content, for example, to make copies of, retain, transmit, reformat, display, and distribute via communication tools Your Content on the Services." [1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/servicesagreement/upcoming.aspx https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/servicesagreement/upcoming.a...
nvm0n2 3y ago
That's the only mention of AI using content. So it can be read in a few ways: 1. They will sometimes use the data for training their RLHF stuff, to "prevent harmful use" of the services. 2. The clause is exhaustive and therefore they won't use it for training, as otherwise that'd be mentioned, and are just going to log stuff for the usual monitoring purposes. This is a storm in a teacup. I don't even know why I should care. If MS crawl some web pages I've written and AI gets slightly smarter by reading them, or if I have a chat with the AI and some engineers use it to make the AI work better, great. It's very hard to imagine concrete, real harm from them being able to do this, though I can understand why companies might worry about it spitting out their source code verbatim in some cases.
- dspillett 3y ago
  > I don't even know why I should care. If MS crawl some web pages I've written and AI gets slightly smarter by reading them Crawling public web pages is a separate issue⁰ – by putting something online you aren't explicitly agreeing to any of MS's policies, at least in the eyes of the law. This is the same for anyone crawling public content not just MS. This privacy policy covers all the content you might use MS apps and services for, i.e. where you are¹ automatically agreeing to MS's policies: OneDrive, potentially any local-only documents in Office, code in VS and other tools, perhaps anything stored on your PC running Windows. > I don't even know why I should care. If you don't use any MS products or services, and no products/services you do use are backed by MS's services, then you don't need to care personally. Or indeed if you do but consider everything you output or otherwise work on to be public domain. Otherwise, maybe it is something you should form an opinion on? ---- [0] time to switch my robots.txt files to “User-agent: * Disallow: /” – though it is very likely already too late for any existing content [1] except where limited by law that you can afford to argue with MS's legal team over
  - mowthie 3y ago
    > If you don't use any MS products or services, and no products/services you do use are backed by MS's services, then you don't need to care personally. I beg to differ, wouldn't they be more inclined to care in case their data was being used in a product they do not interact with, rather than the one they do use - and in some way benefit from it?
    - dspillett 3y ago
      That is a huge grey area of indirect use/agreement. If they don't interact with those services than someone else has given MS the data so from MS's PoV someone else has agreed to the policy and from the users PoV someone else has perhaps given their data to MS without permission. So yes, a concern, but not necessarily one relating to this policy except any clauses it has about removing data and its use when they are informed they shouldn't have it.
  - nvm0n2 3y ago
dspillett 3y ago
That paragraph says some things that they can do. It in no way says they won't use your content for AI training and any number of other things. Mozilla's point is that the whole document is sufficiently vague that they could use it to defend pretty much whatever use of your content that conceive of now or in the near future.
- grabeh 3y ago
  Why would they single out those specific uses then, if you consider express prohibitions are necessary?
  - dspillett 3y ago
    To make it look, on cursory reading, like the policy is something you are comfortable to agree to. Legal theatre. Also because those specific uses are mentioned in existing law and/or have been otherwise successfully defended. It gives their lawyers as many explicit tools as possible, before they need to argue around the implicit ones enabled by their policies & agreements being deliberately more vague elsewhere. The point is that if they don't say that they won't, then they pretty much can if they choose to.
    - grabeh 3y ago
      Interesting! A rather cynical approach. Although preferable to naivety on my part - I'd expect a court to hold the list exhaustive if challenged.
lnxg33k1 3y ago
Vested interests, yes. History, also. For first, Mozilla doesn't do this every week. And Mozilla has a history to keep in mind general population interests for privacy and security. On the other hand, we have a corporation with a history of cheating, lying, stealing, scamming people, from fighting standards, abusing positions of power, overwriting choices going against their shareholders interests. So yeah, vested interests, but also we need to keep in mind the history of both entities Also Mozilla didn't say "Oh we have the MS new ToS and we keep them private", they're there, get a lawyer and see if they're obvious to understand?

by grabeh 3y ago

flakeoil 3y ago

If I understand the below correctly then it seems they can use your data for whatever purpose they want. Also training AI even though it does not explicitly say so. "2b. To the extent necessary to provide the Services to you and others, to protect you and the Services, and to improve Microsoft products and services, you grant to Microsoft a worldwide and royalty-free intellectual property license to use Your Content, for example, to make copies of, retain, transmit, reformat, display, and distribute via communication tools Your Content on the Services." [1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/servicesagreement/upcoming.aspx https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/servicesagreement/upcoming.a...

nvm0n2 3y ago

That's the only mention of AI using content. So it can be read in a few ways: 1. They will sometimes use the data for training their RLHF stuff, to "prevent harmful use" of the services. 2. The clause is exhaustive and therefore they won't use it for training, as otherwise that'd be mentioned, and are just going to log stuff for the usual monitoring purposes. This is a storm in a teacup. I don't even know why I should care. If MS crawl some web pages I've written and AI gets slightly smarter by reading them, or if I have a chat with the AI and some engineers use it to make the AI work better, great. It's very hard to imagine concrete, real harm from them being able to do this, though I can understand why companies might worry about it spitting out their source code verbatim in some cases.

dspillett 3y ago
> I don't even know why I should care. If MS crawl some web pages I've written and AI gets slightly smarter by reading them Crawling public web pages is a separate issue⁰ – by putting something online you aren't explicitly agreeing to any of MS's policies, at least in the eyes of the law. This is the same for anyone crawling public content not just MS. This privacy policy covers all the content you might use MS apps and services for, i.e. where you are¹ automatically agreeing to MS's policies: OneDrive, potentially any local-only documents in Office, code in VS and other tools, perhaps anything stored on your PC running Windows. > I don't even know why I should care. If you don't use any MS products or services, and no products/services you do use are backed by MS's services, then you don't need to care personally. Or indeed if you do but consider everything you output or otherwise work on to be public domain. Otherwise, maybe it is something you should form an opinion on? ---- [0] time to switch my robots.txt files to “User-agent: * Disallow: /” – though it is very likely already too late for any existing content [1] except where limited by law that you can afford to argue with MS's legal team over
- mowthie 3y ago
  > If you don't use any MS products or services, and no products/services you do use are backed by MS's services, then you don't need to care personally. I beg to differ, wouldn't they be more inclined to care in case their data was being used in a product they do not interact with, rather than the one they do use - and in some way benefit from it?
  - dspillett 3y ago
    That is a huge grey area of indirect use/agreement. If they don't interact with those services than someone else has given MS the data so from MS's PoV someone else has agreed to the policy and from the users PoV someone else has perhaps given their data to MS without permission. So yes, a concern, but not necessarily one relating to this policy except any clauses it has about removing data and its use when they are informed they shouldn't have it.
- nvm0n2 3y ago

dspillett 3y ago

That paragraph says some things that they can do. It in no way says they won't use your content for AI training and any number of other things. Mozilla's point is that the whole document is sufficiently vague that they could use it to defend pretty much whatever use of your content that conceive of now or in the near future.

grabeh 3y ago
Why would they single out those specific uses then, if you consider express prohibitions are necessary?
- dspillett 3y ago
  To make it look, on cursory reading, like the policy is something you are comfortable to agree to. Legal theatre. Also because those specific uses are mentioned in existing law and/or have been otherwise successfully defended. It gives their lawyers as many explicit tools as possible, before they need to argue around the implicit ones enabled by their policies & agreements being deliberately more vague elsewhere. The point is that if they don't say that they won't, then they pretty much can if they choose to.
  - grabeh 3y ago
    Interesting! A rather cynical approach. Although preferable to naivety on my part - I'd expect a court to hold the list exhaustive if challenged.

lnxg33k1 3y ago

Vested interests, yes. History, also. For first, Mozilla doesn't do this every week. And Mozilla has a history to keep in mind general population interests for privacy and security. On the other hand, we have a corporation with a history of cheating, lying, stealing, scamming people, from fighting standards, abusing positions of power, overwriting choices going against their shareholders interests. So yeah, vested interests, but also we need to keep in mind the history of both entities Also Mozilla didn't say "Oh we have the MS new ToS and we keep them private", they're there, get a lawyer and see if they're obvious to understand?