Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) is suing Elon Musk’s X. According to Irish TV RTE, the commission launched High Court proceedings against Twitter International over concerns about how Europeans’ public posts on X were being used to train the company’s artificial intelligence tools. The data protection watchdog is particularly concerned that European users’ data is being used for training The next version of Grok It will be released sometime this month, which Musk previously said.
In July, X introduced a change that automatically enabled the settings for all users and allowed the website to use its public posts on the platform to further train its AI chatbot. Commission he said TechCrunch Seeing that he had been in contact with the company for months on the subject, he said that he was surprised by X’s decision. X has a help page that guides users how to refuse Their data has been used for AI training since at least May, but it did not specify whether access to people’s data was enabled by default.
DPC acknowledged that X gives people an opt-out mechanism. However, this is not enough for the agency, which claims that there are still a significant number of European-based X users whose data was processed without the protection of these mitigation measures. According to the commission, X’s use of people’s data to train Grok violates its obligations under the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Not offering users a timely opt-out mechanism also violates GDPR, he added.
whom TechCrunch notes that there must be at least one legal basis for a European user’s data to be lawfully processed under the GDPR. If a company wants to process a user’s data lawfully, for example, it must obtain their express consent, or it must be because the user has to fulfill contractual obligations. There are other legitimate purposes for which an individual’s data may be used, but the DPC’s complaint indicates that it does not believe X has any legal basis for its actions.
X’s Irish unit, Twitter International, has also reportedly refused to stop processing users’ data and delay the launch of the next version of Grok as requested by the commission. That’s why the DPC decided to pursue its complaint – so it can ask the court to stop or completely ban the company from training any AI systems with X users’ data. If the court finds that X has indeed violated the GDPR, the company could be fined up to 4 percent of its annual worldwide turnover.
