Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) is urgent Google for extra details about its plans to construct a checkout function into its Gemini AI chatbot. In a letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Warren expresses issues that the combination may permit Google and retailers “to use delicate consumer knowledge” or “manipulate shoppers into spending extra and paying increased costs.”
Final month, Google introduced that it’s going to quickly permit customers to purchase merchandise immediately inside Gemini by the Common Commerce Protocol (UCP), a regular it developed in partnership with Shopify, Goal, Walmart, Wayfair, and Etsy. The UCP is meant to make it simpler for AI brokers to speak with retailers, however Warren needs to know simply how a lot consumer info — and what sorts — Google plans on offering to retailers by this pipeline.
“Google already possesses unprecedented troves of consumer search and AI chat knowledge, and such intimate knowledge may very well be merged with each consumer knowledge from different Google providers and third-party retailer knowledge to drive shopper habits in an exploitative method,” Warren writes, whereas additionally questioning whether or not Google will prioritize buying outcomes from retail companions over opponents.
Warren provides that the corporate has already admitted that it’s going to use “delicate knowledge to assist retailers upsell shoppers into shopping for a extra ‘premium’ product.” The letter cites a reply from Google on X during which it clarified that retailers will have the ability to “present extra premium product choices that folks could be keen on.”
Along with a sequence of questions on consumer privateness, Warren is asking Google for details about how consumer knowledge will have an effect on pricing, in addition to whether or not it’ll inform customers when Gemini suggests a product “based mostly on upselling goals, promoting incentives, or delicate consumer knowledge.” Google has till February seventeenth to reply.
