Elon Musk-owned social networking website X (formerly Twitter) has been caught overruling GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) compliance in a series of nine privacy complaints filed in several countries including Austria, Belgium, Greece, Ireland, France, Netherlands, Poland, Italy, and Spain. X allegedly found breaching the personal data available on X of over 60 million EU/EEA users to train its AI model Grok without seeking users’ consent beforehand.
The idea that X has already begun processing users’ post data of the region came to light after an X user spotted the setting revealing the same. The revelation did not go down well with the DPC (Irish Data Protection Commission), leading to a surveillance of X’s compliance according to GDPR compliance. The authority has initiated legal action in court against portal X to discontinue illegal processing of users' data and enforce GDPR compliance with Twitter. However, by no means, the firm can erase “already ingested data” for X users. In response, the noyb has lodged GDPR complaints in eight countries including Ireland.
As per the statement given to media, Max Schrems, Chairman of the nonprofit organization NOYB, said, “We have seen countless instances if inefficient and partial enforcement by the DPC in the past years. 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.”
According to the complaint, X does not have solid grounds on which it profits the user data of 60 million people in the European Union without obtaining consent. Users of X were eventually given the option to opt out of data processing through a setting added to X’s web version, apparently in late July. However, there was no way to prevent the processing done before that. Notably, as per DPC, X began data processing of user data of the EU to train its AI model from 7th May to 1st August.
“Companies that interact directly with users simply need to show them a yes/no prompt before using their data. They do this regularly for lots of other things, so it would definitely be possible for AI training as well,” said Schrems.
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