VIENNA (Reuters) – Austrian civil rights group NOYB on Monday filed a complaint against social media platform X, accusing the Elon Musk-owned company of training its artificial intelligence using users’ personal data without their consent in violation of European Union privacy law.
The group led by privacy activist Max Schrems said it has filed complaints under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) with authorities in nine EU jurisdictions to increase pressure on the Irish Data Protection Authority (DPC).
The Irish Data Protection Commission, the EU’s lead regulator for most major internet companies in the US because of the country’s EU operations, has sought an order to suspend or restrict X’s ability to process user data for the purposes of developing, training or improving its AI systems.
X has agreed not to train its AI systems for now using personal data collected from EU users before they have the option to withdraw their consent, an Irish court heard last week.
However, NOYB said the DPC’s complaint primarily concerns mitigation measures and Company X’s lack of cooperation, and does not question the legality of the data processing itself.
“We want to ensure that Twitter fully complies with EU law, which requires – at the very least – asking users for consent in this case,” Schrems said in a statement, referring to X by its former name.
In a hearing last week, an Irish court found that X did not give its users the opportunity to object until several weeks after it began collecting data.
X did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday. X’s global government affairs account said on Friday that the company would continue to work with the Data Protection Commission on AI issues.
In June, Meta, the parent company of Facebook (NASDAQ:), announced that it would not launch its AI assistant in Europe for the time being after the Irish data protection authority informed it of the delay in its plan.
NOYB has filed complaints in several countries against the use of personal data to train software in this case as well.
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