Social platform X said on Friday it would cooperate with European regulators after agreeing to suspend the use of the personal data of European users it was criticized for training its Grok artificial intelligence chatbot.
After Elon Musk’s social platform began using personal data in public posts from European users, Ireland’s data protection commission (DPC) launched a court case claiming it was violating users’ data privacy rights.
As X has its European headquarters in Ireland, the country’s data protection commission is the main regulator in Europe for the social platform.
“We will continue to work with DPC on Grok and other AI issues as we have since last year,” X said in a post.
This comes after the Irish Data Protection Commission announced on Thursday that the social platform had agreed to suspend the use of personal data contained in the public posts of X users in Europe to train Grok.
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The DPC said X has agreed to suspend the use of users’ personal data while European data regulators review whether this processing complies with the European data privacy directive, GDPR.
DPC chief commissioner Des Hogan said “today’s developments will help us continue to protect the rights and freedoms of X users across the EU and EEA”.
The European Economic Area includes the 27 EU countries plus Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway.
In June, Meta backed off plans to use personal data from Facebook and Instagram posts in Europe to train its AI model after data privacy lobby group NOYB — None of Your Business — filed complaints with many countries.
NOYB is concerned that platforms do not give users clear opportunities to opt-out of their data being used for AI training, as required by European data regulations.
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X said earlier this week that it had provided users with such an option.
“Unlike the rest of the AI industry, we’ve chosen to provide a simple control to all X users that allows them to decide whether their public posts and engagement activity could be used to improve the models Grok uses” , the platform said in a statement.
Source: AFP