Starlink Now Uses Customers' Personal Data for AI Training

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.extremetech.com/internet/psa-starlink-now-uses-customers-personal-data-for-ai-training

Starlink recently updated its Privacy Policy to explicitly allow it to share personal customer data with companies to train AI models. This appears to have been done without any warning to customers (I certainly didn't get any email about it), though some eagle-eyed users noticed a new opt-out toggle on their profile page.

The updated Privacy Policy buries the AI training declaration at the end of its existing data sharing policies. It reads:

"We may share your personal information with our affiliates, service providers, and third-party collaborators for the purposes we outline above (e.g., hosting and maintaining our online services, performing backup and storage services, processing payments, transmitting communications, performing advertising or analytics services, or completing your privacy rights requests) and, unless you opt out, for training artificial intelligence models, including for their own independent purposes."

SpaceX doesn't make it clear which AI companies or AI models it might be involved in training, though xAI's Grok seems the most likely, given that it is owned and operated by SpaceX CEO Elon Musk.

Elsewhere in Starlink's Privacy Policy, it also discusses using personal data to train its own AI models, stating:

"We may use your personal information: [...] to train our machine learning or artificial intelligence models for the purposes outlined in this policy."

Unfortunately, there doesn't appear to be any opt-out option for that. I asked the Grok support bot whether opting out with the toggle would prevent Starlink from using data for AI training, too, and it said it would, but I'm not sure I believe it.

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