On Wednesday, social network X (formerly Twitter) updated its Privacy Policy to indicate that it would allow third-party "collaborators" to train their AI models on X data unless users opt out. X owner Elon Musk trained xAI's Grok AI chatbot on X user data, leading to an investigation by the EU's lead privacy regulator - though the company hadn't yet amended its policy to indicate its data may also be used by third parties.

The addendum to the policy suggests X, like Reddit and many other media firms, is exploring licensing data to AI companies as a new revenue source.

In Section 3 of the new Privacy Policy called "Sharing Information," X added a new paragraph outlining how X user data could be used and how users could opt out from that use.

It includes:

"Third-party collaborators. Depending on your preferences, or if you choose to share your information, we may share or disclose your information with third parties. If you do not opt out, in certain instances the recipients of the information may use it for their own independent purposes beyond those described in X's Privacy Policy, including, for example, to train their artificial intelligence models, whether generative or otherwise."

The policy links to the settings page on X, though does not say where in those settings users would go to turn off data sharing. As of writing, toggling data sharing on and off in the "Privacy and safety" section of settings is available, but here it only provides the choice to either data share with xAI's Grok or with other "business partners," which is defined as those companies that X might work with to "run and improve its products," rather than some other AI providers.

That could be because the updated privacy policy doesn't kick in until November 15 at which point it could add an opt-out provision. (We hope.)

The company also scrubbed the now famous paragraph stating, "We maintain user profile information and content for the duration of your account," and that it keeps other "personally identifiable data we collect when you use our products and services for a maximum of 18 months."

The new section does nothing of that sort but explains that X shall retain "different kinds of information for different lengths of time, depending on how long we need to retain it in order to provide you with our products and services, to comply with our legal requirements and for safety and security reasons." Usage information like "content you post" and your interactions with others' content will be kept for the "life of your account or until such content is removed.".

The policy also added a note saying that public content may be available elsewhere even if it has been taken off X. This may arguably even catch in ingestion data by AI providers, as X notes, "search engines and other third parties may retain copies of your posts longer, based upon their own privacy policies, even after they are deleted or expire on X.".

But, separately, the new "Liquidated Damages" section has been introduced in the revised Terms of Service in X: any organization scraping its content will be liable for damages. More particularly, "for requesting, viewing, or accessing more than 1,000,000 posts (including reply posts, video posts, image posts, and any other posts) in any 24-hour period," X says the organization will be charged $15,000 USD per 1,000,000 posts.

The move to monetize X data comes a few months after advertiser withdrawals and boycotts, as well as a subscription feature that has yet to take off.