Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) has announced it has launched a “cross-border legislative investigation” into Google’s core artificial intelligence (AI) model to determine whether the tech giant followed the region’s data protection rules when handling the personal data of European users.
“The statutory inquiry concerns whether Google has fulfilled any obligations it may have had to carry out an assessment under Article 35(2) of the General Data Protection Regulation (Data Protection Impact Assessment) before engaging in the processing of personal data of EU/EEA data subjects related to the development of their foundational artificial intelligence model, Pathways Language Model 2 (PaLM 2),” DPC said.
PALM 2 is Google’s modern language model with improved multilingual, thinking and coding capabilities. It was promulgated company in May 2023.
With Google’s European headquarters in Dublin, the DPC acts as the primary regulator responsible for ensuring that the company complies with strict data privacy security rules.
The DPC said the investigation was crucial to ensuring that people’s fundamental rights and freedoms were protected, particularly where the processing of such data in the development of artificial intelligence systems could lead to “high risks”.
The development comes weeks after social media platform X forever agree not train its Grok AI chatbot using personal data it has collected from European users without obtaining prior consent. Back in August, DPC said X gave consent suspend “the processing of personal data contained in public messages of X users from the EU/EEA that they processed between 7 May 2024 and 1 August 2024”.
Meta, which recently confessed to scraping the public data of every Australian adult Facebook user to train the Llama AI model without giving them the option to opt out, suspended his plans use content posted by European users following a privacy request from the DPC. This too suspended use of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in Brazil after the country’s data protection authority issued a preliminary injunction objecting to a new privacy policy.
Last year, Italy’s privacy regulator did too temporarily banned ChatGPT OpenAI due to concerns that its actions violate data protection laws in the region.
