Starlink customers are the latest grist for the AI mill. The company updated its privacy policy on Jan. 15 to allow harvesting of user data for AI training. Customers are opted in by default, but it’s relatively simple to opt out. 

Starlink says that it may use your personal information “to train our machine learning or artificial intelligence models.” The policy adds that this data might also be shared with third parties “for training artificial intelligence models, including for their own independent purposes.”

Sure enough, when I checked my own Starlink account, I was greeted with a message telling me, “You allow your data to be used to train AI models.”

“It's part of this whole rush to just throw everything into the data-driven machine-learning nexus, and then hoping something more good will come out of it, your private information be damned,” William Budington, a technologist for the digital rights nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation, told CNET. 

What data Starlink is gobbling up is the big question. The privacy policy outlines the typical data you’d expect an internet provider to collect: contact information, performance metrics and billing details. But Starlink also says it may collect “communication information, such as audio, electronic or visual information” and, cryptically, “inferences we may make from other personal information we collect.” 

A separate Starlink page says, “Your internet history will never be shared with AI models, including individual browsing habits or geolocation tracking.”

Traffic on most sites is encrypted through the HTTPS standard, which means Starlink won’t necessarily be able to use your emails or personal communications to train AI. Still, the sites you visit (and when you visit them) are incredibly useful to companies training AI models -- and potentially damaging to individuals.

“There are a number of dangers here,” said Buddington. “There's the danger of AI prompt engineering in generative AI models, and that prompt engineering leading to the AI being able to produce the original data that was fed into the training.”

As a 2023 article in Scientific American put it, “AI models can regurgitate the same material that was used to train them -- including sensitive personal data and copyrighted work.”

The AI addition to Starlink’s privacy policy came just two weeks before SpaceX announced that it was acquiring another Musk company, xAI. Starlink currently has more than 9 million customers worldwide. 

How to opt out of Starlink’s AI training

If you don’t want your data to be used to train AI models, opting out of Starlink’s new policy is relatively simple, and you can do it from either the app or website.

In both cases, you need to log in, navigate to the account portal and click the section that says Privacy Preferences. From there, uncheck the box that allows Starlink to use your data to train AI models. 

You’ll then see a statement under your account information that says, “Your data will not be used to train AI models.”

Even if you opt out, you should still use a VPN

If you’re concerned about your personal data being used to train AI models by Starlink or anyone else, the best thing you can do is use a VPN you trust. 

“That will encrypt your communications right through to the VPN, so that Starlink doesn't have any insight into your internet communications,” Budington said. “That’s the best way to protect yourself against your data winding up in Starlink’s training data that they're feeding to AI models.”

Keep in mind, unless you install a VPN on your router directly, you’ll have to connect to each device individually to protect it.