The Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) has announced that it has launched a “cross-border statutory investigation” into Google’s core artificial intelligence (AI) model to determine whether the tech giant complied with data protection regulations in the region when processing the personal data of European users.
“The statutory investigation concerns whether Google complied with any obligations it may have had to carry out an assessment, in accordance with 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 associated with the development of its foundational AI model, Pathways Language Model 2 (PaLM 2),” the DPC said. said.
PaLM 2 is Google’s cutting-edge language model with enhanced multilingual, reasoning, and coding capabilities. revealed by the company in May 2023.
With Google’s European headquarters based in Dublin, the DPC acts as the lead regulator responsible for ensuring the company complies with the bloc’s strict data privacy rules.
The DPC said an investigation is essential to ensure that individuals’ fundamental rights and freedoms are protected, particularly where the processing of such data during the development of AI systems may result in a “high risk”.
The development comes weeks after social media platform X permanently agreed not to train its AI chatbot, Grok, to use personal data it has collected from European users without obtaining prior consent. Last August, the DPC had stated that X agreed to suspend its “processing of personal data contained in public posts of EU/EEA users of X that it processed between 7 May 2024 and 1 August 2024”.
Meta, who recently admitted to scrape public data from every Australian adult Facebook user to train its Llama AI models without giving them the option to opt out, a suspended his plans to use content posted by European users following a request from the DPC regarding privacy concerns. It also suspended the use of generative AI (GenAI) in Brazil after the country’s data protection authority issued a preliminary ban opposing its new privacy policy.
Last year, Italy’s data privacy regulator also temporarily banned OpenAI’s ChatGPT due to concerns that its practices violate data protection laws in the region.
