What are the implications of Microsoft’s Privacy Concerns for AI Overviews, Google, and the House of Representatives to the Information Commissioner’s Office?

Steve Elcock, CEO and founder of software firm Elementsuite, says that there is a lot of data that artificial intelligence companies want to train their models with. This vast amount of data collection means there’s the potential for sensitive information to be put “into somebody else’s ecosystem,” says Jeff Watkins, chief product and technology officer at digital consultancy xDesign. It could be later coerced through clever prompting.

In May, privacy campaigners dubbed Microsoft’s new Recall tool a potential “privacy nightmare” due to its ability to take screenshots of your laptop every few seconds. The feature caught the eyes of the Information Commissioner’s Office which is asking Microsoft to provide more information about the safety of the product.

Privacy experts are concerned that the ability to take a pic in Openai’s upcoming macOS app could result in the capture of sensitive data.

The risk of leaking House data to non-House approved cloud services is what prompted the House of Representatives to ban the use of Microsoft’s Copilot among staff.

Meanwhile, market analyst Gartner has cautioned that “using Copilot for Microsoft 365 exposes the risks of sensitive data and content exposure internally and externally.” And last month, Google was forced to make adjustments to its new search feature, AI Overviews, after screenshots of bizarre and misleading answers to queries went viral.

The threat of the hacking of these systems is something that we must be aware of. If an attacker could gain access to the large language model, they could snatch off sensitive data, plant false or misleading outputs, or use the Artificial Intelligence to spread malicious software.

If access privileges have not been locked down, this could be used to look at sensitive data. It was possible that employees would ask to see pay scales, M&A activity or documents with credentials, which could then be leaked or sold.

The Google AI Overviews Bounce? Comment on BrightEdge Chairman Jim Yu, CEO, and Founder, and CEO, Marcello Andreev

Anyone who has looked at the internet in the last few weeks probably noticed that the upgrade to its search engine had a rocky start. Within days of the company launching AI-generated answers to search queries called AI Overviews, the feature was widely mocked for producing wrong and sometimes bonkers answers, like recommendations to eat rocks or make pizza with glue.

Jim Yu, the founder and executive chairman of BrightEdge, believes the drop-off is indicative of a cautious approach by the company. “There’s obviously some risks they’re trying to tightly manage,” he says. But Yu adds that he’s generally optimistic about how Google is approaching AI Overviews, and sees these early problems as a “blip” rather than a feature.