NEW YORK, Jan. 31 — SpaceX has revised its Starlink privacy policy to allow customer data to be used for AI training. This could strengthen Elon Musk’s AI ambitions.
Ahead of a major IPO planned for later this year, SpaceX is in merger talks with Musk’s AI company xAI, a deal first reported by Reuters on Thursday. SpaceX, already the world’s most valuable private company, could be worth more than US$1 trillion (RM4 trillion) after its IPO.
According to Starlink’s website, Starlink updated its global privacy policy on January 15th. The policy includes new details that unless users opt out, Starlink’s data may be used “to train our machine learning or artificial intelligence models” and may be shared with the company’s service providers and “third-party collaborators” without providing further details.
A previous version of the privacy policy, archived in November and seen by Reuters, did not include language regarding AI training on Starlink data.
SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment.
Starlink provides a treasure trove of data
Starlink collects vast amounts of user data, including location information, credit card information, contact information, and user IP addresses. It also collects so-called communication data, according to the company’s global privacy policy. This includes audio and visual information, data in shared files, and “information inferred from other personal information we collect.”
The policy did not make clear what data would be used to train the AI. The move has raised concerns among privacy and consumer rights groups, who argue that using personal data to train AI risks expanding surveillance and creates new avenues for abuse.
“It certainly raises some eyebrows and I would be concerned if I were a Starlink user,” said Anupam Chander, a technology law professor at Georgetown University. “In many cases, data is used completely legally, but there are no clear restrictions on what it can be used for.”
Musk’s xAI, which was recently valued at US$230 billion after a recent funding round, currently develops the Grok LLM chatbot and also owns social media platform X.
A potential merger with xAI would accelerate the space company’s deployment of AI-powered services while providing xAI with vast new datasets to be used to train models, including communications data. Starlink is a network of more than 9,000 satellites that currently provides internet connectivity to more than 9 million users. — Reuters
