Starlink says it may also share personal data with partners to help it “develop AI-powered tools that improve your customer experience.”
Joe Supan is a senior writer for CNET covering home technology, broadband and moving. Before joining CNET, Joe led MyMove’s mobile coverage and reported on broadband policy, the digital divide and privacy issues for the Allconnect broadband market. He has been featured as a guest columnist on Broadband Breakfast, and his work has been referenced by the Los Angeles Times, Forbes, National Geographic, Yahoo! Finance and more.
Starlink clients are the latest thing for the AI mill. The company updated its privacy policy on January 15 to allow the collection of user data for AI training. Customers are registered by default, but it is relatively simple to unsubscribe.
Starlink says it may use your personal information “to train our machine learning or artificial intelligence models.” The policy adds that this data could also be shared with third parties “to train artificial intelligence models, including for their own independent purposes.”
Sure enough, when I verified my own Starlink account, I was greeted with a message saying: “You allow your data to be used to train AI models. »
Starlink automatically authorizes you to allow your personal information to be used to train AI models.
Starlink/CNET“It’s part of this whole rush of throwing everything into the nexus of data-driven machine learning and then hoping something more positive comes out of it, to hell with your private information,” William Budington, a technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights nonprofit, told CNET.
What data Starlink gobbles up is the big question. The privacy policy describes the typical data you would expect an Internet service provider to collect: contact information, performance metrics, and billing details. But Starlink also says it may collect “communications information, such as audio, electronic or visual information” and, cryptically, “inferences we may make from other personal information we collect.”
A separate Starlink page states: “Your internet history will never be shared with AI models, including individual browsing habits or geolocation tracking. »
Traffic on most sites is encrypted using the HTTPS standard, which means Starlink won’t necessarily be able to use your emails or personal communications to train the AI. Yet the sites you visit (and when you visit them) are incredibly useful to companies that train AI models – and potentially harmful to individuals.
“There are a number of dangers here,” Buddington said. “There is the danger of rapid AI engineering in generative AI models, and this rapid engineering leads to the AI being able to produce the original data that was fed into the training.”
As a 2023 Scientific American article puts it, “AI models can regurgitate the same material used to train them, including sensitive personal data and copyrighted works.”
The addition of AI to Starlink’s privacy policy came just two weeks before SpaceX announced that it was acquiring another Musk company, xAI. Starlink currently has over 9 million customers worldwide.
How to unsubscribe from Starlink AI training
If you don’t want your data to be used to train AI models, opting out of Starlink’s new policy is relatively simple and you can do so from the app or website.
In both cases, you must log in, go to the account portal and click on the section that says Privacy Preferences. From there, uncheck the box that allows Starlink to use your data to train AI models.
You will then see a statement under your account information saying: “Your data will not be used to train AI models. »
Even if you opt out, you should still use a VPN
If you are concerned that your personal data is being used to train AI models by Starlink or someone else, the best thing you can do is use a VPN you trust.
“This will encrypt your communications all the way to the VPN, so Starlink has no insight into your internet communications,” Budington said. “This is the best way to protect yourself from your data ending up in Starlink’s training data that they pass to the AI models.”
Keep in mind, unless you install a VPN on your router directly, you will have to log in to each device individually to protect it.
