As lawyers ready their strategies for an imminent patent infringement lawsuit that may render Google liable for up to $7.01 billion, a U.S. District Judge in Massachusetts has also issued an order with direct implications on the jury’s privacy. Judge Dennis Saylor IV explicitly prohibited Google from leveraging its access to massive amounts of user data for any potential advantage during the jury selection process in the trial of Singular Computing v. Google, setting a crucial privacy boundary for the tech giant.
Boston-based hardware and software developer, Singular Computing, claims that Google infringed upon their products, the Tensor Processing Units. These artificial intelligence “accelerators” are well-optimized for training and inference of large-scale AI models and find applications in areas such as chatbots, code generation, and synthetic speech.
Though Google’s counsel reassured that it had no intentions of exploiting user data for litigation benefit, Judge Saylor underlined the need for a prohibiting order, given the substantial potential for unwarranted and asymmetrical invasion of jurors’ privacy. This development adds another significant layer to the proceedings of the case.
More details of this ongoing case are available in the full report.