Brazil Ceases Meta’s AI Data Processing Amid Privacy Worries
The Brazilian data protection body, Autoridade Nacional de Proteção de Dados (ANPD), has placed a temporary ban on Meta from handling users’ personal information to educate the company’s artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms.
As per the ANPD’s announcement, they discovered “indications of personal data processing based on insufficient legal grounds, absence of transparency, infringement on data subject rights, and endangerment to children and teenagers.”
The ruling comes in response to the social media corporation’s recent adjustment to its terms, permitting the use of public content from Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram for AI training purposes.
A fresh report issued by Human Rights Watch highlighted that LAION-5B, one of the most sizable image-text datasets employed to train AI models, contained connections to identifiable images of Brazilian youngsters, placing them in vulnerability to malevolent deepfakes that could subject them to more exploitation and harm.
Brazil boasts approximately 102 million active users, making it one of the primary markets. The ANPD emphasized that Meta’s amendment violates the General Personal Data Protection Law (LGBD) and poses “a direct risk of severe and irreparable or hard-to-rectify harm to the fundamental rights of the influenced data subjects.”
Meta has a timeframe of five operational days to adhere to the directive, failing which it faces daily penalties of 50,000 reais (around $8,808).
In a declaration shared with the Associated Press, the firm expressed that its approach “adheres to privacy statutes and norms in Brazil,” and portrayed the judgment as “a step in the opposite direction for innovation, rivalry in AI progression, and further postpones the delivery of AI benefits to the populace in Brazil.”
The social networking company has faced similar opposition in the European Union (E.U.), prompting a pause on efforts to educate its AI models using data from users in the region without explicit user consent.
In a recent statement by Meta’s global affairs president, Nick Clegg, posted on Medium, he suggested that the E.U. was impeding “fertile terrain for innovation” by being overly restrictive towards tech enterprises.
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