Ireland's Watchdog Launches Inquiry into Google's AI Data Practices in Europe

The Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) has announced that it has commenced a "Cross-Border statutory inquiry" into Google's foundational artificial intelligence (AI) model to determine whether the tech giant has adhered to data protection regulations in the region when processing the personal data of European users.

"The statutory inquiry concerns the question of whether Google has complied with any obligations that it may have had to undertake an assessment, pursuant to Article 35[2] of the General Data Protection Regulation (Data Protection Impact Assessment), prior to engaging in the processing of the personal data of E.U./E.E.A. data subjects associated with the development of its foundational AI model, Pathways Language Model 2 (PaLM 2)," the DPC said.

PaLM 2 is Google's state-of-the-art language model with increased multilingual, reasoning, and coding capabilities. It was introduced by the firm in May 2023.

With Google's European headquarters headquartered in Dublin, the DPC operates as the principal regulator responsible for ensuring sure the corporation abides by the bloc's tough data privacy laws.

The DPC said an investigation is important to guarantee that people' basic rights and freedoms be maintained, particularly when processing of such data while building AI systems might lead to a "high risk."

The development comes weeks after social network company X permanently promised not to train its AI chatbot, Grok, using the personal data it obtained from European users without gaining prior authorization. Back in August, the DPC stated X agreed to cease its "processing of the personal data contained in the public posts of X's E.U./E.E.A. users which it processed between 7 May 2024 and 1 August 2024."

Meta, which recently acknowledged to harvesting every Australian adult Facebook user's public data to train its Llama AI models without providing them an opt-out, has suspended its ambitions to exploit information provided by European users after a request from the DPC over privacy concerns. It has also halted the usage of generative AI (GenAI) in Brazil after the country's data protection body issued a preliminary ban objecting to its new privacy policy.

Last year, Italy's data privacy commission also briefly banned OpenAI's ChatGPT because of worries that its methods are in breach of data protection regulations in the area.