OpenAI on trial: the question on the legality of data scraping

A lawsuit was filed recently in California against OpenAI, the artificial intelligence firm responsible for the popular ChatGPT app. This has reignited a decade-old debate about the legal and ethical concerns that arise from tech companies trying to scrape as much information as possible from everyone and everything on the web.

The lawsuit, filed on behalf of 16 customers, alleges a variety of damages ranging from copyright infringement to data interception due to OpenAI's data collection practices. This contributes to a growing list of legal challenges against companies that reprocess or reuse images, personal information, code and other data for their own purposes.

The expansion of scraping and its implications

The pace of development of new AI technologies by major tech companies and a growing number of startups has accelerated not only the scale of web scraping, but also the potential damage that comes with it. Experts note that while web scraping can have societal benefits, such as business transparency and academic research, it can also pose risks, such as those to cybersecurity and scammers harvesting sensitive information for fraud.

Furthermore, the implication of privacy and other personally identifiable information raises a number of privacy issues. These privacy concerns are at the heart of recent litigation in California, which accuses OpenAI of scouring the web to steal "private information, including personally identifiable information, from hundreds of millions of internet users, including children of all ages, without their informed consent or knowledge."

The fight for control of personal data

How AI companies might use that data to train their models could lead to unforeseen consequences for those whose privacy has been violated. It will be very difficult for those whose privacy has been violated to recover such data.

“Data scraping cases have a long history in the United States and go all the way to the Supreme Court. In November 2022, the court heard a six-year-old case from LinkedIn accusing data firm HiQ Labs of hacking the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act by scraping profiles from the networking site to build its product The supreme court denied the claim that scraping amounted to hacking and sent the case back to a lower court where it was eventually settled.

Potential repercussions and future implications

Now Microsoft, the parent company of LinkedIn, sits on the other side of the court, named as a plaintiff in three related lawsuits against OpenAI. The California Litigation Against OpenAI combines the arguments of several of these lawsuits into one massive 157-page filing.

The privacy arguments of the OpenAI litigation may be even more difficult to argue. While curtailing federal privacy laws make it difficult to pursue a data scraping case on such grounds, experts say that without a comprehensive privacy law that doesn't have a blanket exemption for publicly available data, there is a risk that this country becomes a safe haven for malicious scrapers.