VIENNA (Reuters) – Austrian advocacy group NOYB filed a complaint against social media platform x on Monday, accusing the Elon Musk-owned company of training its artificial intelligence (ai) with users' personal data without their consent, in violation of EU privacy law.
The group led by privacy activist Max Schrems announced it had filed complaints about the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) with nine EU authorities to increase pressure on the Irish data protection authority (DPC).
Ireland’s Data Protection Commission, the lead EU regulator for most major US internet companies due to the location of their EU operations in the country, has sought an order to suspend or restrict x from processing user data for the purpose of developing, training or refining its artificial intelligence systems.
x has agreed not to train its ai systems for now using personal data collected from EU users before they had the option to withdraw their consent, an Irish court heard last week.
However, NOYB said the complaint to the DPC primarily concerns mitigation measures and x's lack of cooperation, and does not question the legality of the data processing itself.
“We want to ensure that twitter fully complies with EU law, which at a minimum requires seeking user consent in this case,” Schrems said in a statement, referring to x by its former name.
At last week's hearing, an Irish court found that x had only given its users the opportunity to object several weeks after data collection began.
x did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday. x’s Global Government Affairs account said Friday that the company would continue to work with the DPC on ai issues.
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In June, facebook (NASDAQ:facebook) parent company Meta announced it would not be launching its ai assistant in Europe for the time being after the Irish DPC told it to delay its plan.
In this case, too, NOYB had filed complaints in several countries against the use of personal data for software training.
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