Google Bard blocks all European Union countries

https://9to5google.com/2023/05/11/google-bard-european-union/

by amadeuspagel • 3 years ago

164 268 3 years ago

9to5google.com

jruohonen2• 3 years ago

If the GDPR is behind the block, as alleged in this article, blocking will not save them (from a legal perspective).

Raudius• 3 years ago

Do you have a source for this?

According to: https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/data-protection/r...

Provided your company doesn't specifically target its services at individuals in the EU, it is not subject to the rules of the GDPR.

jruohonen2• 3 years ago

Well that is right there in the FAQ you posted, assuming that they're processing personal data of Europeans (which they presumably do).

column• 3 years ago

and Switzerland

rzzzt• 3 years ago

and Canada

philshem• 3 years ago

and Lichtenstein

gcatalfamo3• 3 years ago

Honestly, announcing public release in 180+ countries, and omitting that you are leaving out half of western civilization, it's outright malignant.

jasonvorhe• 3 years ago

As if overly specific semi-truths are anything new in marketing speak. :)

bioemerl7• 3 years ago

I do not think it's remotely fair to Google to be angry at them for following EU laws.

mellosouls6• 3 years ago

Are you being sarcastic or trolling?

Google is presumably not competent or willing here to uphold or conform to important law in a leading democratic region, which is rather different to "following" it - and if indicating an intentional direction, pretty much a disgrace for a flagship tech company - so let's hope it's just temporary poor performance (or charitably, a staggered release) unrepresentative of their intentions going forward.

cccbbbaaa2• 3 years ago

If they did follow EU laws, Bard would be available there…

ranger_danger2• 3 years ago

I think the anger actually comes from users upset that Google did not design their product in such a way that it complies with EU laws so that it can be used there.

beepbooptheory• 3 years ago

Why malignant? It's presumably still that number of countries, and its not like there is anything special about "western civilization." There is still a whole lot of planet outside of Europe!

siva7• 3 years ago

Except when it comes to profit, there may be something special about western civilization

gcatalfamo3• 3 years ago

Western civilization was a figure speech

sclarisse4• 3 years ago

Look, you can have the laws protecting your citizens from the horrors of everyday web-cookies and the privacy nightmares of the surveillance industry all you like. You can make them as heavy handed as you want, threaten massive fines on worldwide revenue, go mad.

You just can’t have them and also simultaneously expect everyone is going to find it worthwhile to deal with you under such laws, such that you’re outraged when they don’t. Or, well, you can, but it’s either quite foolish of you, or it’s imperialistic.

prepend5• 3 years ago

OpenAI finds it worthwhile. So I guess they are working out pretty well.

This seems to be an inferiority on Google’s part and they couldn’t work out support at launch. I expect they will eventually add support, they’re just lagging a bit. It’s not some value judgement.

ghaff3• 3 years ago

There's this implicit embedded assumption that because it's the EU we're talking about and not some small developing nation of course you can't just take your ball and decide not to play with them. But of course if you can make the finances work you can do just that.

Barrin92• 3 years ago

can’t have them and also simultaneously expect everyone is going to find it worthwhile

wait do people think Google is going to forfeit the 20 trillion European market instead of just making some angry noises, adjustments and going live in Europe a month later?

lou13062• 3 years ago

I'll have "cannot immediately use shiny new thing from faceless soulless tech giant" over "have to live under constant threat of identity theft and personal info leak" any day of the week, thank you.

bertil12• 3 years ago

EU privacy rules are not about the horrors of web-cookies. They require asking for informed consent when you do things that are invading privacies.

All the annoying cookie pop-ups are not mandated by the EU; they are a consequence of website operators choosing to use traffic data in a way that some users might disagree with. You can easily do without. You can, and many do, make them clear and informative.

Those laws would be imperialistic if a majority of citizens around the world, including a vast majority of American citizens, would not gladly demand the same protection when shown what websites do with their information.

This is not just about a frustrating cookie pop-up; this is about having legal options to prevent spammy telemarketers from scamming your elderly relatives. This is about mandating a way to tell ad platforms not to sell you prams after the death of your infant, or show gambling and alcohol ads to addicts.

aqme282• 3 years ago

Listen, I agree with you that the web cookie stuff is a pain in the ass, but I'm all on board requiring user's informed consent about what you do with their data. It's Google that's being a little bit evil here.

dahwolf• 3 years ago

"You just can’t have them and also simultaneously expect everyone is going to find it worthwhile to deal with you under such laws"

Actually, we totally can. I can guarantee you that Bard will become available in the EU at one point.

thefz2• 3 years ago

Fine. Keep GPT, Twitter, Meta or any other toxic social media inside US borders. Zero problem here.

flerovium• 3 years ago

Even in the US, we should all be scared that Google is attempting to strong arm the EU. It means less privacy for all of us.

brookst3• 3 years ago

Don’t people just assume that new tech isn’t going to appear in EU for a while, if ever? Does it need to be said with each release?

dukeyukey2• 3 years ago

We aren't EU any more (UK), but even when we were, the UK seemed to get first-dibs on most new tech releases after the US, and more often than not at the same time as.

belter2• 3 years ago

They can map the Moon and Mars, but the back ancient maps of Mordor, don't extend towards Europe, the lands on ancient alchemists. :-)

factorialboy3• 3 years ago

I live it the EU.

No it is not malignant. The west needs to realize it is not the center of the world.

China and India alone (given the population and economic growth trajectory) plus the US (given it's economic clout) are the critical markets a for-profit enterprise needs to target.

sebzim45004• 3 years ago

Doesn't the EU have more than 5x the GDP of India? Why would you expect anyone to prioritize India above the EU?

alwayseasy5• 3 years ago

Come on, why are you defending a misleading marketing tactic. Any American company that announces in English it "launches in 180 countries" tends to imply the G20 is in it.

hfhdndnfbdbd• 3 years ago

I don't see why "western civilization" should be a relevant category for a technology release. You're leaving the EU out, yes, and that's relevant in itself. I don't get why leaving X% of western civilization or not would add anything to it.

(Btw, I consider latinamerica to be mostly part of western civilization...eastern europe too, so the EU is much less than 50%. However, people that care about the term usually prefer to exclude non white people for some reason)

gniv• 3 years ago

I wonder if they omitted the explanation -- ie, how exactly it violates GDPR -- since it might get others in trouble (notably ChatGPT).

amadeuspagel3• 3 years ago

What entitlement! What justifies this? What is so special about europe?

gdy• 3 years ago

"it's outright malignant"

Reminds me of 'when you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.'

washadjeffmad• 3 years ago

That's kind of a stretch when Bard has been barely relevant since its launch.

It's somewhere between a 7B and 13B for most tasks, which can be run on a cellphone now, and we were already able to run better models locally on commodity hardware. Model complexity and capability are improving so quickly that there's no feasible way for Google to respond.

Sure, Google don't want to look like they're late to a party and under-dressed, but Meta just got a decade of advancement for free in three months with the LLaMa leak. They're looking for anything they can say to sound like they're making progress.

Benchmark this stuff yourself. Use logic problems, have the local model talk through them, and if it doesn't understand what to do, you'll be shocked how a single hint or seed change can lead it to a solution. You can even ask them to generate contexts for themselves that would help them solve those types of problem in the future, which work incredibly well.

Combined with arbitrary length context and long term memory projects, finetuning almost isn't necessary with sufficiently large models. It's really exciting.

singularity20012• 3 years ago

Germany was explicitly included in the 180+ countries list, so we will see.

aembleton• 3 years ago

I can't see it in here: https://support.google.com/bard/answer/13575153?hl=en&sjid=1...

anonyfox• 3 years ago

So they give up the largest market in the world (European countries combined) to their competitors right from the start. Smart move :-)

snacktaster• 3 years ago

I would suggest that EU should produce it's own AI company to compete at that scale in their own market but we all know that's not going to happen. Just get angry they can't access the American companies technology anymore.

prepend5• 3 years ago

Remember Quaero? [0] Back when Europe (really just France and Germany) tried to make their own google competitor to prevent English language dominance? They spent at least $99M and really did nothing.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero

FpUser• 3 years ago

So having largest "internal" market the EU still lacks in developing their own products. Smart move :-)

dukeyukey2• 3 years ago

Because the EU isn't really a market (at least for consumer goods), it's dozens of markets. Despite no tariffs and (very) roughly aligned regulations, you've still got dozens of languages, norms, expectations, and income levels. Something developed and tested in Massachusetts will sell better in Wyoming than something developed and tested in Bulgaria will in Sweden.

Funnily enough, despite being part of the EU for decades and still having a comprehensive trade agreement with them, the UK's success in tech is probably more to do with being culturally closer to North America.

prepend5• 3 years ago

Europe stopped being the largest market a few years ago.

I’m 2021, the eu gdp was US$17.2T [0]. I think that makes them #3 after China at $17.7[1] and the US at $23.2 [2].

So it’s not that odd that Google and others would prioritize other, larger markets above EU. But still seems pretty bone headed of google to not be capable of including such massive populations and markets at launch. Perhaps they could have used some of those 13k fired workers on this launch.

[0] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/EUU/european-union/gdp... [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=china+gdp [2] https://www.google.com/search?q=us+gdp

SpacePortKnight• 3 years ago

GDP is not market.

EU's consumer market is bigger than China and India combined. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_consumer_marke...

PurpleRamen3• 3 years ago

No, they just release it later. According to Google, they want more localization before they release it in the not yet supported countries. Which might be culture, but could also mean abiding by laws and regulations.

blibble3• 3 years ago

EU ceased to be the largest market when the UK left

now it's number 3 or 4 (depending how you define market)

alwayseasy5• 3 years ago

It's still number 2, we're talking about a consumer market, not a market.

crucialfelix• 3 years ago

I'm going to be charitable and assume they just need to make sure of GDPR compliance and didn't want to delay further.

gcatalfamo3• 3 years ago

Of course that's the reason, but the way it was delivered it's what makes it embarassing.

jylam• 3 years ago

"Google Bard blocks all European Union countries" more like "Google Bard illegal in the European Union", like it is a Google choice at all.

TheFattestNinja• 3 years ago

It kinda is though? Like, to make a product that is illegal there when the competition operates (arguably) better within the legal framework. We can argue if the law is just, but this is not the EU treating Bard differently than its competitors, so it's more of a product choice.

JustLurking2022• 3 years ago

The answer is that OpenAI has a lot less revenue on the line, so they're more willing to take risks in legal grey areas.

ithkuil6• 3 years ago

No the EU is not treating bard differently. The EU is not doing anything yet. I don't see how Bing or OpenAI can comply with GDPR.

The difference is that Google seems to care more (perhaps because they are under bigger scrutiny) while MS and OpenAI are pulling a "better to ask forgiveness than ask permissions".

Funny how no matter what you do you're damned.

If google decides to just roll it out everywhere like openai and bing did and then wait until a complaint or a lawsuit comes and only then pull the solution out of the hat (you just got several months for free in order to work on a solution while waiting for the complaint or lawsuit), well if google does that they'd be criticised because they do that. If they pause the relevant markets, well they're criticised because it's "immoral to be just complying with weaker laws since there is a stronger law somewhere else that should be taken as example for everyone"

dtech• 3 years ago

There's nothing inherently illegal about Bard/ChatGTP (yet). They just want to do stuff like collect all user input and train on it that's illegal in EU.

bertil12• 3 years ago

To do that, you have to ask for users’ informed consent.

dandellion2• 3 years ago

"Google Bard won't even bother to try and comply with consumer privacy protections"

brookst3• 3 years ago

“Upside of complying with EU regulations not worth cost and risk”

shever73• 3 years ago

That is probably the most succinct way of putting it.

thinkingemote2• 3 years ago

I wonder if we will see some kind of compliance or control panel for data sharing in the future. Perhaps only EU citizens will have this privilege.

drstewart4• 3 years ago

You should see how many European banks don't bother to comply with basic financial corruption protections and just block US citizens from having accounts

raverbashing• 3 years ago

Bard is not being "blocked" (more like, hasn't been released) only in the EU and nothing says it is past beta stage anyway, but that being said it can be a case of: "American companies trying to comply with regulation in the most spiteful way possible"

See also: the recent sesame controversy

ithkuil6• 3 years ago

Or perhaps just: "we need some time to setup things so that we can comply and we don't want to block a global rollout to countries that don't bother creating laws that protect their citizens"

hagbarth• 3 years ago

ChatGPT runs just fine. This is Google not wanting to comply.

sgt1012• 3 years ago

More likely a legal opinion in Google that is waving a shroud of non-compliance and a $200m fine.

Result : every exec immediately stops everything until this is clarified. They have to, it's their legal duty and if we are talking Google scale revenues there's a lot at stake. Many shareholders are waiting to sue...

YetAnotherNick• 3 years ago

Italy has banned ChatGPT and European Parliament is already planning to curb it[1]. If I have to bet, ChatGPT will likely face some serious issues in europe in coming months.

[1] https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2023/05/11/meps-push-to-b...

PurpleRamen3• 3 years ago

It's not illegal, they are just extra careful to not break something. They know how expensive it can be to fail in EU.

rikkuri2• 3 years ago

Interestingly you can use Bard in Åland Islands, which is part of Finland, which is part of EU. They should have googled Åland Islands.

nindalf• 3 years ago

The mistake is understandable because they Barded it.

rikkuri2• 3 years ago

Welcome to world of LLMs where we get facts almost right.

yorwba2• 3 years ago

That also tells us they didn't actually check for every place on their list whether Bard was compliant with local law – they're simply assuming that some small island country's regulators have no power over them.

bertil12• 3 years ago

Åland is squarely part of the European Union. (It’s also never really claimed to be a country, more a cultural exception within a de-colonization effort and a tax loophole.)

The relevant regulator if Google infringes the privacy of someone there would be the central EU authorities.

bertil12• 3 years ago

For anyone wondering how Google could make that mistake:

- Talk to your data engineers more often: they knew that would happen and they need your shoulder to cry on. Don’t mention “disputed territories” and time zones unless they feel in a safe place.

- Several places are not fully independent countries but are somewhat sovereign. They tend to be listed in lists of ‘countries,’ which is really a list of *‘polities’*. “Polities” include distinctions like the Åland Islands being distinct from mainland Finland. Corsica, Sardinia, and Sicily are often not on those lists, despite all having a solid national identity, so those are not always great lists of polities either. And those lists often include military and scientific bases afar, like Antarctic bases and the International Space Station, so… There’s no clear name for it. Essentially, it’s a list of what comes out of a GeoIP lookup.

Like Åland, French Polynesia, French Guyana, Reunion Island, both Saint-Martins (French and Dutch), Azores, and Greenland are all polities with very interesting statuses around the EU. Staying “near” the EU, some scientific bases and areas with hardly any population on that list of polities, too: Kerguelen, French Austral Territory, Tristan de Cunha, etc. Those are more curiosities to give content fodder for Wendover Production and administrative exams than actual legal risks for Google, but I thought I’d pile up, to help you develop empathy for Data engineers building privacy filters.

The point is: there is no “mainland Finland” in the list of polities: just “Finland — FI” one of 27 members of the EU. “French Polynesia - FP”, “French Guyana - FG” and all the others mentioned above are not on that list of 27 country codes either. Therefore, any territory in the EU but listed as a polity might get excluded from hastily configured EU filters, like what Google seems to have made. I would assume that GPDR does apply to most of the places I mentioned, making the mistake that Google made common among all those edge cases.

rikkuri, you are not alone.

France seems to be being most of those headaches. However, both the US (with Porto Rico, Guam, and more) and the UK are impressive specialists in confusing sovereignty): the Faroe Islands, the Isle of Man, Guernsey, and Jersey all used to be somehow in the EU, but not when the UK was in. Northern Ireland is probably the most heated situation of all those. I will not go into the nightmare that is deciding between UK, or GB, or one of EN, SC, WA, and NI.

Andorra, Monaco, Vatican, San Marino, and Liechtenstein are generally considered outside, or “observers,” of the EU but in the EEA (those countries plus Norway). Pro-tip: EEA is de facto the relevant grouping in most cases.

More importantly, all those places plus many rather large actual countries (Canada, Switzerland, Japan, Israel, New Zealand, South Korea, and Argentina) have privacy rules that are equivalent to the EU’s and have been granted “adequacy” status. I’d expect all those need to be excluded from Bard for the same reason but many are not… Curious.

https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/data-protection/i... to be

Overall, that makes a much longer and more complicated list than 27 country codes.

jcranmer• 3 years ago

the Faroe Islands

Are part of Denmark, not the UK. The other ones you mentioned are essentially part of the UK (I'm too lazy right now to look up the official terminology in the UK is for them).

jiggawatts• 3 years ago

This is the most informative yet entertaining rant outside of a Wendover Production I have encountered in a while. You had me at "safe space". Well done!

Thaxll• 3 years ago

What's up with Canada?

Tyr42• 3 years ago

It can't speak French Soni guess they can't launch or else Quebec will come after them? Maybe?

joenot443• 3 years ago

There's no Canadian or Quebecois law which requires American companies to serve their products in French.

jacknews• 3 years ago

Quel dommage!

WilTimSon• 3 years ago

Well, I suppose that's one benefit of Brexit, isn't it? In all seriousness, it's a shame that the project is going to be restricted from a development standpoint, but, frankly, with Google's reputation for privacy violations and their former clashes with GDPR, this shouldn't be a surprise and, for quite a few people, will be a welcome piece of news.

indigomm2• 3 years ago

The UK has retained almost all EU law, including GDPR. If GDPR is a problem in the EU, then why isn't it a problem in the UK given the law is identical?

sgt1012• 3 years ago

UK courts work very differently.

skilled2• 3 years ago

Lol so that’s why I can’t use it. I thought it strange that Norway wasn’t part of the 180 countries.

Goes to show how much Google values saving face over being honest with its users. Pathetic.

xiphias2• 3 years ago

Maybe it's time to stop thinking that some countries are better then others and just treat them as different. Your sense of privilege with ,,lol'' means that you consider people in Norway more important than in other countries.

skilled2• 3 years ago

Maybe you shouldn’t reach so hard. I am not even from Norway. Couldn’t care less if they only released it in Uzbekistan.

Colex2• 3 years ago

It is a very valid strategy. If you do not have all the controls in place to comply with the burdensome requirements of the EU law (if that's the case), then why should you stop from releasing the service in other markets that do not impose such requirements? A lot of comments here have a sense of entitlement that does not make too much sense to me, especially towards a private company doing a first release of a product. (PS: I live in the EU as well)

prepend5• 3 years ago

They should have used chatgpt to develop their controls. OpenAI figured out how to do it.

It’s weird when a company with Googles resources flubs their rollout. They have a main competitor. Their main competitor does something. They launch with not doing something. Typically, a company wants to launch with doing something better than their competitor.

gman83• 3 years ago

Do Google's lawyers know something that Microsoft's lawyers don't? Or do they just have more to lose?

cbeach• 3 years ago

Google have felt the sharp end of EU regulations several times, at a cost measured in billions of Euros

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antitrust_cases_against_Goog...

Might be a lesson that OpenAI is yet to learn.

bertil12• 3 years ago

OpenAI already went through a cycle with the Italian authorities (with presumably the German regulator listening in too). The fix was very simple: give users the option not to have their queries used for training.

We are still pretty far from an anti-trust case, which is generally harder to navigate.

GPDR and other EU regulations on privacy and AI have fairly simple principles: if you do something that is not obvious or necessary (like fraud detection), ask for informed consent. Explain what you are doing, make your steps traceable, allow people to be excluded from non-trivial treatment, to delete the personal information they handed over. It makes some processes a little bit harder to set up, but it’s not really a hard lesson you can only learn by being sued for billions. It’s closer to data engineering 101.

is_true2• 3 years ago

They are probably waiting to see what happens with Open AI's compliance of GDPR

tomkaos• 3 years ago

...and Canada

thijser• 3 years ago

I used ChatGPT (because no access to bard :) ) to convert their 180 country names to 3-letter codes and generate a world map showing where it's available:

https://twitter.com/thijser/status/1656943947556569090

Definitely not what I had expected with "180 countries"

belter2• 3 years ago

Always assumed Canada had a kind of European flavor to it. Thanks Google for confirming it...

bartislartfast2• 3 years ago

Well they do speak French

contingencies• 3 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Pierre_and_Miquelon

letqin• 3 years ago

They for sure do, they spell a lot of words different as they use the French spelling. Like neighbour and favour.

newswasboring• 3 years ago

Weird that its not available in Brazil. Thats a big market, no?

dlisboa• 3 years ago

Google has been at odds with Brazil's judicial system, likely doesn't want to add more controversial fuel to the fire.

ElectricalUnion• 3 years ago

Brazil implements a local copy of GDPR, "LGPD".

PurpleRamen3• 3 years ago

Apparently it's 180 Countries and regions. So every little island is included, even if it's not a separate country. Someone at Google finally learned marketing I guess.

singularity20012• 3 years ago

   >> Someone at Google finally learned marketing I guess.

not sure if it's good marketing though. the first impression of disappointment and annoyance (and lack of veracity) might stick.

robjan• 3 years ago

"Regions" is used so that it captures disputed territories such as Taiwan (TWN) and semi-autonomous regions which have country codes but aren't countries e.g Hong Kong (HKG) and Macau (MAC). You will notice that most airlines and international companies now refer to country dropdowns as region dropdowns, primarily to satisfy the Chinese government.

twic• 3 years ago

If someone builds a service on top of Bard (the way Phind is built on top of GPT-4), can they offer that in the EU?

endisneigh• 3 years ago

nothing is stopping them, but they likely wouldn't be in compliance with the law

thinkingemote2• 3 years ago

I had to check and double check but I guess this is one tiny benefit of the UKs withdrawal from the EU I suppose (it's not blocked in the UK).

Maybe as similar to cookie controls, we will get fine grained acceptance forms, but what if it's only those in the EU that get that?

indigomm2• 3 years ago

GDPR still applies in the UK. Most EU law was kept intact when the UK left the EU. The only difference is that the UK courts enforce it, and it applies to UK citizens. Maybe the US doesn't care because the UK is a small market now :-)

sebzim45004• 3 years ago

The UK does not experience sexual pleasure by fining American companies.

throwaway4good• 3 years ago

So what laws in Canada and the EU that are not on the books in the UK, US, India and Japan prevents Google from rolling this out?

Is there actual something substantial or is it performative on Google's part?

mk89• 3 years ago

What a great way to compete against chatGPT, which just recently got the OK of the Italian "dept. of privacy".

I hope this thing doesn't make it ever to EU.

can16358p• 3 years ago

EU people should force their governments and regulators to change their stance of overly-strict privacy laws, otherwise the whole world will take off leveraging AI tools whereas EU will not have (legally) access to anything.

dgellow• 3 years ago

First that’s not at all how the EU works. Second, we have access to other services, I don’t really see why we should lower our standard because Google doesn’t want to comply. If they don’t want the EU market, that’s fine.

is_true2• 3 years ago

Shhh, let them do it.

esharte• 3 years ago

"Hacker News is full of libertarians"

deelly• 3 years ago

1. What about non EU countries, where Bard is blocked too?

2. "Overly-strict privacy laws". Yeah, asking users about consent is definitely overly-strict regulation.

3. There is other AI models that works just fine in EU countries.

Wait, am I answering to sarcasm?

ragebol• 3 years ago

Why would there need to be this choice between either having privacy OR 'artificial intelligence'?

Does AI require invasion of privacy?

pyrale• 3 years ago

Why? I'm perfectly happy with the idea that some US tech monopolies think twice about doing their stuff here. That's the law working as intended.

And hopefully, that'll give some breathing room for EU companies grow and provide services that respect my rights.

ipaddr• 3 years ago

Excluding the EU and Canada tell us quickly this is something you want to stay away from. Canada has some of the worst privacy laws if bard is worried about them this might be a sign that your privacy will be violated in ways unseen before. Good luck bard users.. the adults have left the room

dkarras• 3 years ago

Honestly, blocked countries are not losing out. I can't believe how behind Google is on all this. Bard in its current incarnation is a disaster. Pretty much all replies are hallucinations. Looks like Google really was caught pants down with with ChatGPT.

r2vcap• 3 years ago

EU citizens, you may be confused that you have been rejected. But isn't that what your government and the bureaucrats in Brussels have brought on themselves? As a Korean citizen, I have no complaints.

ubercow13• 3 years ago

Didn't Korea just pass more data protection laws similar to the GDPR earlier this year?

Raz2• 3 years ago

Imagine someone invents very delicious but carcinogenic sauce. EU will be rejected from its sales too. We just don’t need crap.

Sooner or later we will have a similar tool that respects privacy.

A_D_E_P_T• 3 years ago

Google Bard is blocked in all of continental Europe, EU status notwithstanding.

It is also blocked in:

- Serbia

- Switzerland

- Bosnia

- North Macedonia

- Norway

- Ukraine

And surely there are a couple of others I'm missing.

I struggle to see a reason as to why it's not available in, e.g., Serbia, where their legal risk is surely very low.

rsynnott2• 3 years ago

All of these besides Norway (Norway is, as an EEA state, subject to the GDPR) and Switzerland (whose relationship to the GDPR would be "it's complicated" on its Facebook page) are EU accession candidate states, so at least in principle should be moving closer to EU law.

justinclift• 3 years ago

And nothing of value was lost. :)

speedgoose• 3 years ago

I could test palm2 through Google Cloud and I am not impressed.

While I haven’t measured I feel that Vicuna13b is better. And chatGPT 4 is in another league.

crossroadsguy• 3 years ago

Today I noticed there is no way to create a Google account without a creating a Gmail account. I remember it was possible.

At least ChatGpt gives an option to sign up with any email.

tazjin• 3 years ago

I just checked and I see the option to use an existing email address (in Russia). It's available in the account creation form, as an option below the field that asks you what you want your GMail-address to be.

Might be A/B-testing though and you're in a group that doesn't have it available at the moment.

leodriesch• 3 years ago

I’ve also recently been able to create a Google account with my own email domain, from Germany.

Havoc2• 3 years ago

Bit strange that uk is included. I was under the impression that there are gdpr like rules prevailing there too despite brexit

McDev• 3 years ago

They are. I was going to say the UK's ICO (Information Commissioner's Office) are entirely impotent, however it appears they recently fined TikTok £12.7M for data misuse.

Havoc2• 3 years ago

Not a good sign for Google’s AI endeavours and consumer privacy

magoghm• 3 years ago

When I asked Bard "What do you know about Edgar Allan Poe?" it answered "I'm a text-based AI and can't assist with that." Which I assumed was the result of an overzealous guardrail trying to protect personal private information. And now, when I see that Bard isn't available in the EU I'm starting to wonder if Google included in it's training data something they shouldn't have used.

olvy0• 3 years ago

I got the same. However when I asked Bard "What is the biography of the poet Edgar Allan Poe?" it gave me a full biography, looking suspiciously like it was cribbed from Wikipedia.

Brulaap• 3 years ago

Google Bard? More like Google barred, amiright?

bitshiftfaced• 3 years ago

Maybe Google sees upcoming AI-related legislation in the EU? It looks better to have not entered a market in the first place than to remove a service later on.

cma• 3 years ago

Supporting Europe's "right to be forgotten" would require an 8-9 figure retraining run for each request.

gigel82• 3 years ago

The entitlement of some European citizens on this thread is mind boggling. Of course Google will eventually launch Bard in Europe but I really hope they decide not to now :)

I remember when GDPR rolled around, our entire company paused all product development for half a year to do "compliance work" that changed absolutely nothing material about the actual privacy approach, just bullshit compliance notices and moving privacy settings around, and rewording options. I have some resentment from that and was surprised by the company not choosing to stop doing business in EU altogether (I wish they did).

bastard_op• 3 years ago

What their disclaimer ought to say is "Bard is not available in countries that actually have consumer protections against blind data slurping."

pelorat2• 3 years ago

To be fair, a lot of Google services are not available in the EU.

Google Bard blocks all European Union countries

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