The complaints come less than a week after Irish authorities filed a similar legal complaint against Musk over a change to X’s data settings.
An Austrian non-profit organization has presented nine complaints against Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence (AI) company for violating EU data privacy rules.
In July, users of X, Musk’s social media platform, noticed that a data setting had been changed so that public posts could be used to train Grok AI, Musk’s response to OpenAI.
The European Center for Digital Rights, known as NOYB for ‘None of Your Business’ (or No Es Unto Suyo in Spanish), alleges that X made the change “illegally” to collect data from more than 60 million users of X in the EU.
“Twitter (X) is the next American company to will simply suck data from EU users to train AI,” NOYB said in a statement. “Twitter began irreversibly feeding European user data into its Grok technology in May 2024, without informing them or asking their consent“, said.
The non-profit organization filed complaints under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) of the EU in Austria, Belgium, France, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Spain and Poland.
X would have violated 16 articles of the GDPR
French NOYB complaint accuses X of violating 16 articles of the GDPR regulations because they cannot demonstrate that they have a “legitimate interest” in taking such a large volume of personal data. The social media platform has not revealed how the data will be treated, which NOYB considers another violation.
In X, users see a new category under your data sharing sectionprivacy and sharing called “Grok” after the name of Elon Musk’s generative AI model, where users are asked if they want to opt out of sharing posts and interactions with the system “to be used for training and adjustments.”
The “opt-out” featurediscourages users from exercising their right to choose“, NOYB’s complaint continues, instead of requesting active consent. “The processing of personal data is most likely irreversible,” NOYB says in the complaint.
He claims that X probably will not follow the “rule of the right to be forgotten”, which allows individual users to contact platforms to request that their data be removed and erased from online platforms.
The complaint asks the French National Data Protection Commission (CNIL) to issue an urgent legal decision and to conduct an in-depth investigation into X’s data privacy decisions and declare illegal use of personal data to train AI models without active user consent.
“Companies that interact directly with users simply they need to show them a yes/no message before using their data,” Max Schrems, president of NOYB, said in a statement. “They do this regularly for many other things, so it would definitely be possible for AI training as well,” he added.
“Unjustified and exaggerated”
The challenges come less than a week after Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) will file a legal challenge against Musk for the same data configuration changecalling on the social media platform to immediately suspend, restrict or prohibit the use of personal data in your Grok training.
X announced on August 8 that would stop using data to train its AI in the EU, but added that the DPC order was “unjustified, exaggerated and singles out X without any justification,” according to the social platform’s global governance affairs team.
“While many companies continue to scrape the web to train AI models without taking into account the privacy of the user, X has done everything possible to give users more control over their data,” he continued.
The company said it will “continue to protect” the privacy rights of its users and will “pursue all available avenues.” to challenge the DPC order. In its complaint, NOYB said it is “difficult to know” whether personal information already collected by X will be treated and how it will differ from data collected from other countries.
xAI, Musk’s independent artificial intelligence arm, argues that Grok needs to be trained with the data of to “improve (their) understanding of human language, develop their sense of humor and help you stay politically impartial” says an X help page.
‘Euronews Next’ has contacted X and xAI, but so far, we have not received a response.
