BGR
Google on Thursday quietly announced a big update for Google Bard, which brings several features to Google’s first ChatGPT rival. Among them is multimodal support, or the ability to use both text and images to obtain answers from the chatbot. Also interesting is Bard’s ability to use voice in its answers, and the expanded support for other languages will also come in handy.
But the reason I’m really excited about Google Bard’s mid-July upgrade is something else entirely. Google Bard is now available in the European Union, which means Google is comfortable enough with the chatbot’s privacy features to release it in a region with much stricter privacy rules than the US.
Better Google Bard privacy?
Google made Bard available worldwide at I/O 2023. But the entire EU block wasn’t part of the rollout. Europeans had to use VPNs to talk to Bard. I can attest that Bard works over VPN, so there were no issues there. But Google refrained from releasing Bard in the region because it feared local privacy laws.
Google addresses privacy concerns in its blog post, saying that it’s working with experts, policymakers, and regulators on this Bard expansion to prioritize user privacy and data:
Starting today, you can collaborate with Bard in over 40 languages, including Arabic, Chinese, German, Hindi and Spanish. You can also now access Bard in more places, including Brazil and across Europe. As part of our bold and responsible approach to AI, we’ve proactively engaged with experts, policymakers and privacy regulators on this expansion. And as we bring Bard to more regions and languages over time, we’ll continue to use our AI Principles as a guide, incorporate user feedback, and take steps to protect people’s privacy and data.
Sarah Silverman’s lawsuit against ChatGPT and Meta reminded me of two of the biggest problems related to generative AI: User privacy and copyright.
Google might want to collect all the public data it wants to train Bard and other AI products. But it’ll also have to set in place better privacy protections to avoid problems down the road. Bard’s EU rollout shows that Google might be on the right track.
If Google is ready to have Bard run on EU devices, it means it’s ready to face regulators in the region. The privacy improvements that might come from Bard’s rollout in EU could also benefit US and international users down the road. Meanwhile, Google’s privacy rules for Bard are available at this link.
