AWS customers are sharing sensitive AI data sets including biometrical data and voice inputs with Amazon by default — and many didn’t even know.

AWS Customers are Opting in to Sharing AI Data Sets with Amazon Outside their Chosen Regions and Many Didn’t Know

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2021-06-14 07:30:09

AWS customers are sharing sensitive AI data sets including biometrical data and voice inputs with Amazon by default — and many didn’t even know.

The cloud provider is using customers’ “AI content” for its own product development purposes. It also reserves the right in its small print to store this material outside the geographic regions that AWS customers have explicitly selected.

The move breaks widespread assumptions about data sovereignty, even if this is arguably on customers for not reading the small print. The cloud provider’s users may need to have read through 15,000+ words of service terms to notice this fact.

(The company says it also makes this clear and visible in product FAQs. Those seeking full definitions of “your content” and “AI content” will need to have read through service terms however, which define “your content as “any ‘company content’ and any ‘customer content,”’ and “AI content” as any of this that is processed by an AI service.)

Many appear to have not noticed that they had opted in to doing this by default. AWS has until recently required customers to actively raise a support ticket if they want to stop this happening (if they had noticed it was in the first place).

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