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.

  • 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.

    • 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.

      • 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.