According to None of Your Business (Noyb), the complaints were filed with data protection authorities in Austria, Belgium, France, Greece, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland and Spain.
The group accuses X, formerly Twitter, of feeding its AI with personal data from some 60 million European users without informing them or requesting their consent, as required by EU laws.
"Recently, Twitter International (now rebranded as X) began unlawfully using the personal data of more than 60 million users in the EU/EEA to train its AI technologies (like Grok) without their consent. Unlike Meta (which recently also had to stop AI training in the EU), Twitter did not even inform its users in advance," it said.
🚨 noyb has filed 9 complaints against Twitter/X over unlawful AI training!— noyb (@NOYBeu) 👉 The Irish DPC's court action against X didn't address the core violations. It didn't determine legality and leaves many questions unanswered. noyb requests full investigation.https://t.co/G2kX35vc3yAugust 12, 2024
Last week the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) took legal action against X but Noyb says it was insufficient, pointing out that there was no way for users to force the company to delete "already ingested data".
According to Noyb, most users learned about the AI training via a viral post by an X user on July 26, two months after it began, instead of receiving a request for permission from the company.
Noyb demanded a "full investigation" into X's conduct as well details on how the platform separates the data of European clients from other users and what happens to the data ingested into AI systems.
The group said there was an easy solution for X: ask users for consent.
"If just a small number of Twitter's 60 million users consented to the training of its AI systems, Twitter would have more than enough training data for any new AI model. But asking people for permission is not Twitter's current approach, instead they just take user data without information to users or permission from them," it said.
