X faces Austrian data usage complaint over AI training

VIENNA (Reuters) – Austrian interest group NOYB filed a complaint against social media platform X on Monday, accusing Elon Musk’s company of training its artificial intelligence (AI) with users’ personal data without their consent, thereby violating EU data protection law.

The group, led by data protection activist Max Schrems, announced that it had filed complaints regarding the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) with authorities in nine EU agencies in an effort to increase pressure on the Irish data protection authority DPC.

The Irish Data Protection Commission, which is the lead EU regulator for most of the leading US internet companies due to the establishment of their EU operations in Ireland, has applied for an order to suspend or restrict X’s processing of user data for the purposes of developing, training or refining its AI systems.

As an Irish court heard last week, X has agreed not to train its AI systems with personal data collected from EU users before they have had the opportunity to withdraw their consent.

However, NOYB stated that the DPC’s complaint mainly related to mitigation measures and X’s lack of cooperation and did not question the lawfulness of the data processing itself.

“We want to ensure that Twitter fully complies with EU law, which requires – as an absolute minimum – to obtain user consent in this case,” Schrems said in a statement, referring to X by its previous name.

At last week’s hearing, an Irish court found that X had not given its users the opportunity to object until several weeks after data collection began.

X did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday. The X Global Government Affairs account said on Friday that the company would continue to work with the DPC on AI issues.

In June, Meta, Facebook’s parent company, announced that it would not launch its AI assistant in Europe for the time being after the Irish data protection authority asked it to delay its plan.

In this case, too, NOYB had filed complaints in several countries against the use of personal data to train the software.