They offer a thing they’re calling an “opt-out.”
The opt-out (a) is only available to companies who are slack customers, not end users, and (b) doesn’t actually opt-out.
When a company account holder tries to opt-out, Slack says their data will still be used to train LLMs, but the results won’t be shared with other companies.
LOL no. That’s not an opt-out. The way to opt-out is to stop using Slack.
https://slack.com/intl/en-gb/trust/data-management/privacy-principles
That’s not strictly speaking true. It requires more oversight and mechanisms of control but those very well could already be in place.
If there’s any PII in slack (which in itself is wrong), you cannot use this data for training, since the people whose data is being used have not given their consent. Simple as that.
That’s not true at all. If you obfuscate the PII it stops being PII. This is an extremely common trick companies use to circumvent these laws.
You could say it’s to “circumvent” the law or you could say it’s to comply with the law. As long as the PII is gone what’s the problem?
LLMs have shown time and time again that simple crafted attacks can unmask the training data verbatim.
How do you anonymise without supervision ? And obfuscation isn’t anonymisation…
Maybe it’s “simple as that” if you’re just expressing an opinion, but what’s the legal basis for it?
The entire gdpr. You can’t repurpose user data after the fact, and that includes the purpose of usage, but also the parties the data has been shared with. All these cookie banners have to state clearly “we’re using this data from you and we’re sharing it with these partners”.
I’m pretty sure, that hardly any company lists Slack in their cookie banners or ToS. Thus, sharing any personal data with slack is forbidden. Usually, that was overlooked, because it’s somewhat dubious if slack can be seen as actually “using” the data by just hosting whatever someone posts in a private message, but this announcement makes it very clear, that they intend to use this data.
The GDPR says that information that has been anonymized, for example through statistical analysis, is fine. LLM training is essentially a form of statistical analysis. There’s hardly anything in law that is “simple.”
It’s not even the training. It’s the extraction of the raw data.
You now store PII, that the clients can’t delete anymore (which in itself is a violation) and then do “something” with it. Whether it’s for AI or word counting doesn’t matter. You store PII that is not under the control of your clients anymore and you store PII without the P whose I could be used to I them having ever been informed.
Also, whether AI training is actually legally anonymization is still up to debate, as far as I know.
Assuming it is PII when you store it. This is a complicated discussion that will absolutely come down to what Slack can defend to a regulator
They could try to pass it as a legitimate interest but likely it would be struck as being ultimately disfavouring the individual and favouring the business. Probably.
Well then explain me how you propose to apply data subject rights to a llm… you can’t currently un-train those as far as I know. And that’s not touching IP which isn’t exactly the same here and there.
I’m professionally watching what’s happening with this very topic and the current state of the law and related decisions makes everyone in the business cautious at the very least. Doesn’t prevent business to take risks but it’s risk taking indeed.
That is very much what the EU AI act is trying to get at. LLMs are covered under GPDR and EU AI act, it is not a simple matter