OpenAI Faces Class Action Lawsuit Alleging Data Scraping and Privacy Violations
A class action lawsuit has been filed against OpenAI, an artificial intelligence (AI) company, alleging that its AI tools have violated privacy protection laws. The group of anonymous plaintiffs claim that OpenAI’s AI products have used stolen private information from hundreds of millions of internet users, including children, without their consent or knowledge. The lawsuit alleges that OpenAI has violated various state and federal laws, such as Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act and the federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act.
This lawsuit marks one of the first AI-related lawsuits that is not primarily focused on intellectual property infringement. On the same day, two US authors also sued OpenAI in the Northern District of California, accusing the company of copyright infringement by mining data from books without the writers’ consent.
In a 157-page complaint, the plaintiffs argue that tech companies are introducing society to the risks of AI, which over half of surveyed AI experts believe have at least a 10% chance of catastrophic failure. Although this is one of the first privacy-focused AI lawsuits, it is not the first lawsuit involving data mining and scraping.
In November 2022, the Ninth Circuit ruled on a case involving HiQ Labs, a data science company accused of violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act by scraping public user profiles and related information from a social media website. Following the Supreme Court’s remand, the case ended in a stipulation prohibiting HiQ Labs from further scraping data and destroying the algorithms created using the scraped user data.
Among other claims, the plaintiffs in this class action lawsuit allege that OpenAI has violated the California Consumer Privacy Act by failing to provide sufficient notice and honor consumer requests. The complaint highlights the technical impossibilities for consumers attempting to exercise their right to deletion, asserting that once AI products are trained using an individual’s information, it becomes an integral part of the product and cannot be reasonably extracted.
While the lawsuit includes some broad warnings about AI, it presents a significant legal challenge to OpenAI, especially in light of the FTC-Edmodo order. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) sued Edmodo, an ed-tech provider, for violating children’s privacy and required the deletion of all models or algorithms developed using unlawfully collected personal information from children.
Considering the LinkedIn and Edmodo decisions, OpenAI may face the requirement to destroy its trained AI models, particularly if they are found to incorporate unlawfully scraped personal information. Additionally, the outcome of this lawsuit is likely to impact the data practices and training methods of AI companies across the internet.
