SpaceX has revised its Starlink privacy policy to allow the use of customer data for AI training, a shift \u200bthat could bolster Elon Musk\u2019s AI ambitions.<\/p>\n
Ahead of a blockbuster IPO planned for later this year, SpaceX is in \u2060talks to merge with Musk\u2019s AI company, xAI, a deal first reported by Reuters on January 29.<\/p>\n
SpaceX, already the world\u2019s most valuable private company, could reach a value of more than $A1.4 trillion after the IPO.<\/p>\n
Starlink updated its global privacy policy on January 15, according to the Starlink website.<\/p>\n
The policy includes new details stating that unless a user opts out, \u200cStarlink data may be \u200bused \u201cto train our machine learning or artificial intelligence models\u201d and could be shared with the company\u2019s service \u200dproviders and \u201cthird-party collaborators\u201d, without providing further details.<\/p>\n
Help us deliver more news by registering for our FREE daily news feed. All it requires is your email at the bottom of this article.<\/p>\n
A previous version of the privacy policy, an archived version from November and reviewed by Reuters, did not contain language about AI training on Starlink data.<\/p>\n
SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n
Starlink collects vast amounts of user data, spanning location information, credit card information, contact information and \u200buser IP addresses.<\/p>\n
It also collects so-called communication data, which includes \u200caudio and visual information, data in shared files, and \u201cinferences we may make from other personal information we collect\u201d, according to its global privacy policy.<\/p>\n
The policy \u200bdid not make clear exactly what data would be used to train AI.<\/p>\n
The move has raised concerns \u200damong privacy advocates and consumer rights groups, which argue that using personal data to train AI risks expanding surveillance and creates new avenues for misuse.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt certainly raises my eyebrow and would make me concerned if \u200bI was \u200ba Starlink user,\u201d Anupam Chander, a \u200btechnology law professor at Georgetown University, said.<\/p>\n
\u201cOften there\u2019s perfectly legitimate uses of \u200byour data, but it doesn\u2019t have a clear limit to what kind of uses it will be put to.\u201d<\/p>\n
Musk\u2019s xAI, most recently valued at $A329 billion after a recent funding round, is currently developing its Grok LLM chatbot and also owns X, the social media platform.<\/p>\n
The potential merger with xAI would turbocharge the space company\u2019s deployment of AI-powered services, while giving xAI vast new data sets to train its models on, including communication data.<\/p>\n
Starlink, a network of more than 9000 satellites, currently provides \u200dinternet connection to more than nine million users, including many homes on the Sunshine Coast.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SpaceX has revised its Starlink privacy policy to allow the use of customer data for AI training, a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":465350,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,105],"class_list":{"0":"post-465349","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-au","12":"tag-australia","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/465349","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=465349"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/465349\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/465350"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=465349"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=465349"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=465349"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}