Google’s parent company, Alphabet Inc., advised its employees not to share personal information with the chatbot “Bard,” noting that doing so could lead to privacy leaks, which has reportedly already happened at Samsung.

Kevin Hurler reports,

Four sources close to the matter told Reuters that the massive tech giant has advised employees not to enter confidential information into chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s own Bard over fears of leaks. Alphabet is reportedly concerned with employees inputting sensitive information into these chatbots since human reviewers may sit on the other end reviewing chat entries. These chatbots may also use previous entries to train themselves, posing another risk of a leak. That risk is warranted, as Samsung confirmed last month that its own internal data had been leaked after staff used ChatGPT.

–Kevin Hurler, Google Tells Employees to Stay Away from Its Bard Chatbot (gizmodo.com)

Other companies including Apple and Amazon, have likewise either discouraged or outright forbade the sharing of private information to ChatGPT, citing privacy concerns.

Since November, Big Tech companies have embraced AI, incorporating Large Language Models into their seach engines and hailing these new technologies as the next step in digital communication and learning. Clearly, though, there are problems, and data privacy is chief among them.