The complaints come less than a week after Irish authorities launched a similar legal challenge against Elon Musk over a change in data definitions: An Austrian nonprofit has filed nine complaints against Musk’s AI company for violating EU data privacy regulations.
Last July, users of Musk’s social network X noticed that the data definition had been changed so that public posts could be used to train Grok AI, a chatbot that uses advanced artificial intelligence technology, Musk’s answer to OpenAI.
According to the European Digital Rights Center (NOYB, for “None of Your Business”), X made the change to “illegally” harvest data from more than 60 million X users in the EU. “Twitter (X) is the next American company to scrape EU user data to train AI,” NOYB said in a statement. “Twitter began irreversibly feeding European users’ data into its Grok AI technology in May 2024, without ever informing or asking for their consent,” it denounced.
🚨 Noyeb filed 9 complaints against Twitter/X for illegal AI training!
👉 The Irish DPC’s action against X did not address the underlying violations. It did not determine their legality and left many questions unanswered. Noyb calls for a full investigation.https://t.co/G2kX35vc3y
– NOYBeu August 12, 2024
The nonprofit has filed complaints under the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Austria, Belgium, France, Greece, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and Poland.
What’s at stake?
The French NOYB complaint accuses social network X of violating 16 articles of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), because it cannot prove that it has a “legitimate interest” in collecting such a large volume of personal data. The social media platform did not disclose how the data is processed, which NOYB considers another violation.
In “X,” users will see a new category in the Data Sharing, Privacy, and Engagement section called “Grok,” named after Elon Musk’s generative AI model. “The processing of personal data is likely irreversible,” NOYB says in the complaint.
The complaint asks the French National Data Protection Commission (CNIL) to issue an urgent legal ruling and conduct an in-depth investigation into X’s data privacy decisions and make it illegal to use personal data to train AI models without user consent.
“Companies that interact directly with users only need to show them a yes/no message before using their data,” said Max Schrems, head of NOYB, in a statement. “They do this regularly for many other things, so it would certainly be possible to train AI as well.”
The challenges come less than a week after Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) filed a legal challenge against Elon Musk over the same data settings change, calling on the social media platform to immediately suspend, restrict or block the use of personal data in your account. Exercise. X announced on the 8th of this month that it would stop using data to train its AI in the European Union, but added that the DPC’s order was “unjustified and excessive and that it has chosen X without any justification.”
