Can chatbot be convicted of illegal wiretap? Old Navy AI may answer

With generative AI tools like ChatGPT bound to create more powerful personal assistants that can take over the role of customer service agents, the privacy of your online shopping chat conversations is becoming a focus of court challenges.

Generative AI relies on massive amounts of underlying data — books, research reports, news articles, videos, music and more — to operate. That reliance on data, including copyrighted material, is already the cause of numerous lawsuits by writers and others who discovered their material has been used, without permission or compensation, to train AI. Now, as companies adopt gen AI-powered chatbots another legal can of worms has been opened over consumer privacy.

Can an AI be convicted of illegal wiretapping?

That’s a question currently playing out in court for Gap‘s Old Navy brand, which is facing a lawsuit alleging that its chatbot participates in illegal wiretapping by logging, recording and storing conversations. The suit, filed in the Central District of California, alleges that the chatbot “convincingly impersonates an actual human that encourages consumers to share their personal information.”  

In the filing, the plaintiff says he communicated with what he believed to be a human Old Navy customer service representative and was unaware that the chatbot was recording and storing the “entire conversation,” including keystrokes, mouse clicks and other data about how users navigate the site. The suit also alleges that Old Navy unlawfully shares consumer data with third parties without informing consumers or seeking consent.

Old Navy, through its parent company Gap, declined to comment.

Old Navy isn’t the only one to face similar charges. Dozens of lawsuits have popped up in California against Home Depot, General Motors, Ford, JCPenney and others, citing similar complaints of illegal wiretapping of private online chat conversations, albeit not necessarily with an AI-powered chatbot.

According to AI experts, a likely outcome of the lawsuit is less intriguing than the charges: Old Navy and other companies will add a warning label to inform customers that their data might be recorded and shared for training purposes — much like how customer service calls warn users that conversations may be recorded for training purposes. But the lawsuit also highlights some salient privacy questions about chatbots that need to be sorted out before AI becomes a personal assistant we can trust.

“One of the…