Starlink customers are the latest grist of The AI mill. The company updated its privacy policy on Jan. 15 to allow the collection of user data for AI training. Customers have opted in automatically, but it’s easy to opt out.
Starlink says it may use your personal information to “train our machine learning or artificial intelligence models.” The policy adds that this data may also be shared with third parties “to train artificial intelligence models, including for their own private purposes.”
Sure enough, when I checked my Starlink account, I was greeted with a message telling me, “You are allowing your data to be used to train AI models.”
Starlink automatically opts you out of allowing personal information to be used to train AI models.
“It’s part of this rush to throw everything into the nexus of data-driven learning, and hope something good comes out of it, your private information will be thrown away,” William Budington, an expert at the nonprofit digital rights organization the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told CNET.
What data Starlink uploads is the big question. The privacy policy describes the general data you can expect an internet provider to collect: contact information, performance metrics and payment information. But Starlink also says it may collect “communication information, such as audio, electronic or visual information” and, in private, “inferences we may make on 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 location tracking.”
Traffic to most sites is encrypted at the HTTPS level, which means Starlink can’t actually use your emails or personal communications to train the AI. Still, the sites you visit (and if you visit them) are incredibly useful for companies training AI models — and can cause harm to individuals.
“There are a lot of dangers here,” said Buddington. “There is a risk of rapid engineering of AI in generative AI models, and that rapid engineering results in the AI being able to reproduce the original data that was fed into the training.”
As a 2023 article in Scientific American puts it, “AI models can reproduce the same material that was used to train them — including sensitive personal data and copyrighted work.”
The addition of AI to Starlink’s privacy policy came two weeks ago SpaceX announced that it was buying Musk’s other company, xAI. Starlink currently has over 9 million customers worldwide.
How to opt out of 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 easy, and you can do it from the app or website.
In both cases, you need to log in, go to the account portal and click on the section Privacy Preferences. From there, uncheck the box that allows Starlink to use your data to train AI models.
You will see a statement under your account information that says, “Your data will not be used to train AI models.”
Even if you go out, you should use a VPN
If you are concerned about your personal data being used to train AI models by Starlink or someone else, the best thing to do is use a VPN you trust.
“That will encrypt your connection all the way to the VPN, so Starlink has no knowledge of your internet communications,” Budington said. “That’s the best way to protect your data that stores Starlink’s training data that they feed to the AI models.”
Keep in mind, unless you Install a VPN on your router directly, you will need to connect to each device to protect it.
