Canada has been left out of a recent expansion of Google’s artificial intelligence-powered chatbot known as Bard as the big tech giant continues its fight with the federal government over the Online News Act.

  • Em Adespoton@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    The Bard exclusion isn’t due to the news thing; it’s due to Canada having privacy laws and a privacy watchdog that actually pays attention. If Google expanded to Canada, they’d have to answer a bunch of questions it appears they’d rather avoid.

    • Afiefh@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I was under the impression that the EU has pretty strict privacy laws and oversight. Is Canada stricter?

      • 8275232@feddit.ch
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        1 year ago

        No. Canada might have different laws, but they are no more stringent than the EU or California. Surely there is differing regulations, and might be the market size that had it dropped in priority.

        • bane_killgrind@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          This is right, it’s not hard to imagine that compliance is part of a ROI equation along with number of users.

          EU has a population of 700 million vs Canada’s 40.

          • JshKlsn@lemmy.ml
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            1 year ago

            Excuse me. Canada is gaining like 100K new people per day. That’s 41 mili… 42 m… 45 million to you!

    • LostWon@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      It’s true there are definitely privacy issues with it (esp. where future overlap with Google Docs would be concerned), but their reasoning in the article was “regulatory uncertainty.” At the very least, Alphabet & Google want people to think C-18 is the reason.

    • esty@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      The Canadian privacy watchdog does things? I doubt bard is any more data invasive than meta platforms and they get a pass…

      • Em Adespoton@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        A lot of people seem to have misunderstood what I said.

        The Canadian watchdog asks questions Google likely doesn’t want asked.

        It’s not about penalties, it’s about asking questions that others might then also ask.