Starlink customers are the latest grist for the AI mill. The company updated its privacy policy on Jan. 15 to allow harvesting of user data for AI training. Customers are opted in by default, but it’s relatively simple to opt out.
Starlink says that it may use your personal information “to train our machine learning or artificial intelligence models.” The policy adds that this data might also be shared with third parties “for training artificial intelligence models, including for their own independent purposes.”
Sure enough, when I checked my own Starlink account, I was greeted with a message telling me, “You allow your data to be used to train AI models.”
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Starlink automatically opts you into allowing personal information to be used to train AI models. Starlink / CNET
“It's part of this whole rush to just throw everything into the data-driven machine-learning nexus, and then hoping something more good will come out of it, your private information be damned,” William Budington, a technologist for the digital rights nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation, told CNET.
What data Starlink is gobbling up is the big question. The privacy policy outlines the typical data you’d expect an internet provider to collect: contact information, performance metrics and billing details. But Starlink also says it may collect “communication information, such as audio, electronic or visual information” and, cryptically, “inferences we may make from other personal information we collect.”
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A separate Starlink page says, “Your internet history will never be shared with AI models, including individual browsing habits or geolocation tracking.”
Traffic on most sites is encrypted through the HTTPS standard, which means Starlink won’t necessarily be able to use your emails or personal communications to train AI. Still, the sites you visit (and when you visit them) are incredibly useful to companies training AI models -- and potentially damaging to individuals.
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