The European data protection organization Noyb has filed complaints against Elon Musk’s online platform X in eight EU countries. The “urgent procedures” under the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) on behalf of affected EU citizens concern the X chatbot Grok, whose artificial intelligence is trained by default with contributions from users.
Since X users were not informed in advance about the use of their data for AI training and were not asked for permission, the Irish data protection authority DPC, which is responsible for Twitter’s successor X in Europe, filed a lawsuit against the network last Tuesday. However, the data protection association Noyb believes that this does not go far enough because the lawsuit only deals with minor aspects of the case.
Max Schrems, chairman of Noyb, said: “Companies that interact directly with users simply need to ask them a yes/no question before using their data. They do this regularly for many other things, so it would definitely be possible for AI training as well.”
Urgency required
Given that X has already started processing people’s data for its AI technology, Noyb has requested an “urgency procedure” under Article 66 GDPR in Austria, Belgium, France, Greece, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain. This provision allows data protection authorities to issue provisional orders in such situations and to make an EU-wide decision via the European Data Protection Board.
The unsolicited use of X data and the changed data protection settings were noticed two weeks ago by X user @EasyBakedOven. The checkbox for permission for Grok to use public X posts in addition to direct interactions with the chatbot was automatically checked for everyone.
The setting can only be changed in the web version of X; it is currently not displayed at all in the smartphone app. X announced that this will soon change.
Meta postponed plans – X implements them
In June, under pressure from Irish data protection authorities, the Facebook group Meta postponed its plans to use public contributions from users in Europe to train its AI models indefinitely. Previously, it had been criticized that Meta did not require explicit consent from users, but only the option to object to the use of the data. X is now proceeding as Meta intended.
Grok is intended to compete with other AI chatbots such as the pioneer ChatGPT from OpenAI or Claude from Anthropic. The software is not developed directly by X, but by the company xAI, which is also owned by Musk. He bought Twitter in the fall of 2022 for around $44 billion and renamed the service X.
