Gap’s Old Navy AI Chatbots Accused of Illegal Wiretapping

Can AI chatbots be convicted of illegal wiretapping?

This is the prime question that has arisen following a recent federal lawsuit in California against Gap’s Old Navy alleging that its AI chatbot takes part in illegal wiretapping. According to CNBC, this case accuses Old Navy’s chatbot of that exact crime by logging, recording, and storing conversations with customers.

The plaintiff filing the suit argues that the chatbot “convincingly impersonates an actual human that encourages consumers to share their personal information.” According to the lawsuit, the complainant says he spoke with what he thought was a human customer service rep at Old Navy. But in fact, he was speaking with an AI chatbot who recorded the whole conversation. 

It doesn’t end there though; the suit claims that Old Navy illegally shares customer data with third parties without informing consumers or getting permission.

While there is now a heightened level of concern around privacy with AI, wiretapping is not new. There have been many cases filed against other retailers in California, such as Home Depot, General Motors, Ford, and JCPenney based on illegal wiretapping dating all the way back to the 1960s, according to CNBC.

AI experts predict that this case will result in companies adding a warning label to tell customers that their chatbots might record their conversations, just like the message often played before customer service calls: “This call is being recorded for quality and training purposes.” 

There is another layer to this case. The CNBC report added that this suit sheds light on some serious privacy concerns around AI chatbots that may need to be addressed before consumers can fully trust AI. Speaking to CNBC on these concerns, Irina Raicu, director of the Internet Ethics Program at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University, said, “One of the concerns about these tools is that we don’t know very much about what data was actually used to train them.”

Per CNBC, “Companies haven’t been straightforward about information sources, and with AI-powered chatbots encouraging users to interact and enter information, they could presumably feed personal data into the system. In fact, researchers have been able to pull personal information from AI models using specific prompts, Raicu said.”

By using generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, retailers have been able to add a powerful edge in terms of efficiency to their services, but this non-human addition is what has also landed some retailers at the center of these court obstacles.