VIENNA, Aug 12 (Reuters) - Austrian
advocacy group NOYB on Monday filed a complaint against social media
platform X 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 that it had filed General Data Protection
Regulation (GDPR) complaints with authorities in nine European Union
authorities to ramp up pressure on the Irish data protection authority
DPC.
Ireland's Data Protection
Commission, the lead EU regulator for most of the top U.S. internet
firms due to the location of their EU operations in the country, has
sought an order to suspend
or restrict X from processing the data of users
for the purposes of developing, training or refining its AI 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 DPC complaint
is mainly concerned with mitigation measures and a lack of cooperation
by X, 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 bare minimum – requires to
ask users for consent in this case," said Schrems in a statement,
referring to X by its previous name.
At the hearing last week, an Irish
court found that X had only given its users the opportunity to object
several weeks after the start of data collection.
X did not immediately reply for a
request for comment on Monday. The X Global Government Affairs account
on Friday said the company would continue to work with the DPC about
AI issues.
In June, Facebook parent company
Meta announced that it would not be launching its AI assistant in
Europe for the time being after the Irish DPC told it to delay its
plan.
NOYB had lodged complaints in
several countries against the use of personal data for training the
software in this case too.
Reporting
by Hakan Ersen and Miranda Murray, Editing by Rachel More
and Crispian Balmer
