The Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) said it has launched a “cross-border statutory investigation” into Google’s underlying artificial intelligence (AI) models to determine whether the tech giant complies with European data protection regulations when processing the personal data of European users.
“The statutory investigation concerns the issue of whether Google complied with its obligation to carry out an assessment pursuant to 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 relevant to the development of its underlying AI model, Pathways Language Model 2 (PaLM 2),” the DPC said.
PaLM 2 is Google’s state-of-the-art language model with improved multilingual, inference, and coding capabilities. It was announced by the company in May 2023.
Google’s European headquarters is in Dublin, and the DPC acts as the lead regulator responsible for making sure the company complies with the European Union’s strict data privacy rules.
The DPC said the investigation was essential to ensure that individuals’ fundamental rights and freedoms were protected, as processing such data, particularly when developing AI systems, could lead to “high risks”.
The move comes weeks after social media platform X permanently agreed not to train its AI chatbot “Grok” with personal data collected from European users without their prior consent. In August, the DPC said X had agreed to stop “processing personal data contained in public posts of X’s EU/EEA users that it processed between 7 May 2024 and 1 August 2024.”
Meta recently admitted to collecting all publicly available data from Australian adult Facebook users to train its Llama AI model without permission to opt out, but suspended plans to use European user-submitted content following a request from the DPC over privacy concerns. It also suspended use of Generative AI (GenAI) in Brazil after the Brazilian data protection authority challenged the company’s new privacy policy and issued a provisional ban.
Last year, Italy’s data privacy regulator also temporarily banned OpenAI’s ChatGPT over concerns that its practices violated local data protection laws.
