Slack under attack over sneaky AI training policy

Comment
On the heels of ongoing issues around how big tech is appropriating data from individuals and businesses in the training of AI services, a storm is brewing among Slack users upset over how the Salesforce-owned chat platform is charging ahead with its AI vision.
The company, like many others, is tapping its own user data to train some of its new AI services. But, it turns out that if you don’t want Slack to use your data, you have to email the company to opt out.
And the terms of that engagement are tucked away in what appears to be an out-of-date, confusing privacy policy that no one was paying attention to. That was the case with Slack, until a miffed person posted about them on a community site hugely popular with developers, and then that post went viral…which is what happened here.
It all kicked off last night, when a note on Hacker News raised the issue of how Slack trains its AI services, by way of a straight link to its privacy principles — no additional comment was needed. That post kicked off a longer conversation — and what seemed like news to current Slack users — that Slack opts users in by default to its AI training, and that you need to email a specific address to opt out.
That Hacker News thread then spurred multiple conversations and questions on other platforms: There is a newish, generically named product called “Slack AI” that lets users search for answers and summarize conversation threads, among other things, but why is that not once mentioned by name on that privacy principles page in any way, even to make clear if the privacy policy applies to it? And why does Slack reference both “global models” and “AI models?”
Between people being confused about where Slack is applying its AI privacy principles, and people being surprised and annoyed at the idea of emailing to opt-out — at a company that makes a big deal of touting that “Your control your data” — Slack does not come off well.
The shock might be new, but the terms are not. According to pages on the Internet Archive, the terms have been applicable since at least September 2023. (We have asked the company to confirm.)
Per the privacy policy, Slack is using customer data specifically to train “global models,” which Slack uses to power channel and emoji recommendations and search results. Slack tells us that its usage of the data has specific limits.
“Slack has platform-level machine learning models for things like channel and emoji recommendations and search results. We do not build or train these models in such a way that they could learn, memorize or be able to reproduce some part of customer data,” a company spokesperson told TechCrunch. However, the policy does not appear to address the overall scope and the company’s wider plans for training AI models.
In its terms, Slack says that if customers opt out of data training, they would still benefit from the company’s “globally trained AI/ML models.” But again, in that case, it’s not clear then why the company is using customer data in the first place to power features like emoji recommendations.
The company also said it doesn’t use customer data to train Slack AI.
“Slack AI is a separately purchased add-on that uses large language models (LLMs) but does not train those LLMs on customer data. Slack AI uses LLMs hosted directly within Slack’s AWS infrastructure, so that customer data remains in-house and is not shared with any LLM provider. This ensures that customer data stays in that organization’s control and exclusively for that organization’s use,” a spokesperson said.
Some of the confusion is likely to be addressed sooner rather than later. In a reply to one critical take on Threads from engineer and writer Gergely Orosz, Slack engineer Aaron Maurer conceded that the company needs to update the page to reflect “how these privacy principles play with Slack AI.”
Maurer added that these terms were written at the time when the company didn’t have Slack AI, and these rules reflect the company’s work around search and recommendations. It will be worth examining the terms for future updates, given the confusion around what Slack is currently doing with its AI.
The issues at Slack are a stark reminder that, in the fast-moving world of AI development, user privacy should not be an afterthought and a company’s terms of service should clearly spell out how and when data is used or if it is not.
Have a news tip? Contact Ingrid securely on Signal via ingrid.101 or here. (No PR pitches, please.)
We’re launching an AI newsletter! Sign up here to start receiving it in your inboxes on June 5.
Every weekday and Sunday, you can get the best of TechCrunch’s coverage.
Startups are the core of TechCrunch, so get our best coverage delivered weekly.
The latest Fintech news and analysis, delivered every Sunday.
TechCrunch Mobility is your destination for transportation news and insight.
By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice.
After Apple loosened its App Store guidelines to permit game emulators, the retro game emulator Delta — an app 10 years in the making — hit the top of the…
Meta is once again taking on its competitors by developing a feature that borrows concepts from others — in this case, BeReal and Snapchat. The company is developing a feature…
Welcome to Startups Weekly! We’ve been drowning in AI news this week, with Google’s I/O setting the pace. And Elon Musk rages against the machine.
IndieBio’s Bay Area incubator is about to debut its 15th cohort of biotech startups. We took special note of a few, which were making some major, bordering on ludicrous, claims…
YouTube TV has announced that its multiview feature for watching four streams at once is now available on Android phones and tablets. The Android launch comes two months after YouTube…
Featured Article
CSC ServiceWorks provides laundry machines to thousands of residential homes and universities, but the company ignored requests to fix a security bug.
OpenAI’s Superalignment team, responsible for developing ways to govern and steer “superintelligent” AI systems, was promised 20% of the company’s compute resources, according to a person from that team. But…
TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 is just around the corner, and the buzz is palpable. But what if we told you there’s a chance for you to not just attend, but also…
Decks are all about telling a compelling story and Goodcarbon does a good job on that front. But there’s important information missing too.
Slack is making it difficult for its customers if they want the company to stop using its data for model training.
A Texas-based company that provides health insurance and benefit plans disclosed a data breach affecting almost 2.5 million people, some of whom had their Social Security number stolen. WebTPA said…
Featured Article
Microsoft won’t be facing antitrust scrutiny in the U.K. over its recent investment into French AI startup Mistral AI.
Ember has partnered with HSBC in the U.K. so that the bank’s business customers can access Ember’s services from their online accounts.
Kudos uses AI to figure out consumer spending habits so it can then provide more personalized financial advice, like maximizing rewards and utilizing credit effectively.
The EU’s warning comes after Microsoft failed to respond to a legally binding request for information that focused on its generative AI tools.
The prospects for troubled banking-as-a-service startup Synapse have gone from bad to worse this week after a United States Trustee filed an emergency motion on Wednesday.  The trustee is asking…
U.K.-based Seraphim Space is spinning up its 13th accelerator program, with nine participating companies working on a range of tech from propulsion to in-space manufacturing and space situational awareness. The…
OpenAI has reached a deal with Reddit to use the social news site’s data for training AI models. In a blog post on OpenAI’s press relations site, the company said…
X users will now be able to discover posts from new Communities that are trending directly from an Explore tab within the section.
For Mark Zuckerberg’s 40th birthday, his wife got him a photoshoot. Zuckerberg gives the camera a sly smile as he sits amid a carefully crafted re-creation of his childhood bedroom.…
Strava announced a slew of features, including AI to weed out leaderboard cheats, a new ‘family’ subscription plan, dark mode and more.
We all fall down sometimes. Astronauts are no exception. You need to be in peak physical condition for space travel, but bulky space suits and lower gravity levels can be…
Microsoft will launch its custom Cobalt 100 chips to customers as a public preview at its Build conference next week, TechCrunch has learned. In an analyst briefing ahead of Build,…
What a wild week for transportation news! It was a smorgasbord of news that seemed to touch every sector and theme in transportation.
Sony Music Group has sent letters to more than 700 tech companies and music streaming services to warn them not to use its music to train AI without explicit permission.…
Winston Chi, Butter’s founder and CEO, told TechCrunch that “most parties, including our investors and us, are making money” from the exit.
The investor lawsuit is related to Bolt securing a $30 million personal loan to Ryan Breslow, which was later defaulted on.
Meta, the parent company of Facebook, launched an enterprise version of the prominent social network in 2015. It always seemed like a stretch for a company built on a consumer…
X, formerly Twitter, turned TweetDeck into X Pro and pushed it behind a paywall. But there is a new column-based social media tool in town, and it’s from Instagram Threads.…
As part of 2024’s Accessibility Awareness Day, Google is showing off some updates to Android that should be useful to folks with mobility or vision impairments. Project Gameface allows gamers…
Powered by WordPress VIP

source

Leave a Comment

Vélemény, hozzászólás?

Az e-mail címet nem tesszük közzé. A kötelező mezőket * karakterrel jelöltük