Irish Surveillance Regulatory Commences Investigation into Google’s AI Data Procedures in Europe
The DPC in Ireland has initiated a “Transnational statutory examination” into Google’s foundational artificial intelligence (AI) framework to ascertain if the tech behemoth has followed data privacy statutes in the area when handling the private information of European users.
“The formal examination pertains to evaluating whether Google has fulfilled any duties it might have had to conduct an evaluation, as per Article 35[2] of the General Data Protection Regulation (Data Privacy Impact Assessment), before commencing the handling of the private information of E.U./E.E.A. individuals related to the creation of its foundational AI framework, Pathways Language Model 2 (PaLM 2),” as stated by the DPC mentioned.
PaLM 2 is Google’s cutting-edge language model with enhanced multilingual, logical, and coding capabilities. It was disclosed by the corporation in May 2023.
Being situated in Dublin, Google’s main European base, the DPC functions as the primary overseer responsible for ensuring that the organization adheres to the region’s strict data privacy guidelines.
The DPC articulated that an examination is vital to guarantee the protection of individuals’ essential rights and freedoms, particularly as handling such data while devising AI systems can pose a “substantial risk.”
This move comes following the decision by social networking platform X to permanently concede not to train its AI chatbot, Grok, using the personal data collected from European users without obtaining explicit approval. In August, the DPC verified that X consented to halt its “processing of the personal data found in the public posts of X’s E.U./E.E.A. users which it processed between 7 May 2024 and 1 August 2024.”
Meta, which recently acknowledged its activity of scraping every Australian adult Facebook user’s public data to train its Llama AI models without offering an opt-out, has halted its intentions to utilize content posted by European users following a request from the DPC regarding privacy issues. They have also terminated the deployment of generative AI (GenAI) in Brazil after the nation’s data protection authority imposed an initial prohibition protesting its revised privacy policy.
The previous year, Italy’s data privacy authority also temporarily prohibited OpenAI’s ChatGPT due to concerns that its techniques infringe upon data protection laws in the area.
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