X, the artificial intelligence technology company of Elon Musk, has reportedly been accused of unlawfully feeding personal information about its users to its artificial intelligence technology without their consent according to a privacy campaign group based in Vienna.
This complaint has been filed by a group of individuals known as Noyb.
In early September, Ireland's Data Protection Commission (DPC) filed a lawsuit against X over its data collection practices to train its artificial intelligence systems.
A series of privacy complaints against X, the company formerly known as Twitter, have been filed after it was revealed the platform was using data obtained from European users to train an artificial intelligence chatbot for its Grok AI product without their consent.
In the past couple of weeks, a social media user discovered that X had begun quietly processing the posts of regional users for AI training purposes late last month.
In response to the revelation, TechCrunch reported that the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC), responsible for ensuring that X complies with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), expressed "surprise" at the revelation.
As Musk's company, X has recently announced, all its users can choose whether Grok can access their public posts, the website's artificial intelligence chatbot that is operated by Musk's company X.
If a user wishes to opt out of receiving communications from them, he or she must uncheck a box in their privacy settings.
Despite this, Judge Leonie Reynolds observed that it appeared clear that X had begun processing its EU users' data to train its AI systems on May 7 only to offer the option to opt out from July 16. Additionally, she added, that not all users had access to the feature when it was first introduced.
An organization called NOYB has filed several lawsuits against X on behalf of consumers, a long-standing thorn in Big Tech's side and a persistent privacy activist group.
Max Schrems, the head of NOYB, is a privacy activist who successfully challenged Meta's transfer of EU data to the US as violating the EU's stringent GDPR laws in a lawsuit he filed against Meta in 2017. As a result of this case, Meta has been fined €1.2 billion as well as faced logistical challenges, in June, due to complaints from NOYB, Meta was forced to pause the use of EU users’ data to train the AI systems it has since developed.
There is another issue that NOYB wants to address. They argue that X did not obtain the consent of European Union users before using their data to teach Grok to train Grok. It has been reported that NOYB's spokesperson has told The Daily Upside that the company may find itself facing a fine of up to 4% of its annual revenue as a result of these complaints. Additionally, the punitive measures would also aggravate the situation, as X has a lot less money to play with than Meta does:
It should be noted that X is no longer a publicly traded company, so this means that it is difficult to determine how its cash reserves are doing. However, people know that Musk bought the company in 2022, and when he bought it, it took on roughly $25 billion in debt with a very high leverage ratio.
In the years since the deal was made, the banks that helped finance the transaction have had an increasingly difficult time unloading their shares of the debt, and Fidelity has recently announced a discount on its stake, which gives a hint as to how the firm might be valued.
As of last March, Fidelity's stake had dropped to a value of 67% less than it was when the company acquired the company.
Although Musk was the one who bought Twitter, even before he acquired Twitter, the company had struggled to remain consistently profitable for many years as it was a small fish in a big tech pond.
A key goal of NOYB is to conduct a full-scale investigation into how X was able to train its generative artificial intelligence model, Grok, without any consultation with its users to achieve a better understanding of what they did.
Companies that interact directly with end users only need to display them with a yes/no prompt before using their contact information, Schrems told The Information. There are many other things they do this for regularly, so it would be very possible to train AI in this manner as well.
The Grok2 beta is scheduled to be released on January 1st 2024, and this legal action comes only a few days before Grok 2 is set to launch its beta version.
In the last few years, major tech companies have faced ethical challenges associated with the training of large amounts of data. It was widely reported in June 2024 that Meta was suing 11 European countries over its new privacy policies, which showed the company's intent to use the data generated by each account to train a machine learning algorithm upon the data.
As a result of this particular case, the GDPR is intended to protect European citizens against unexpected uses of their data, such as those that could affect their right to privacy and their freedom to be free from intrusion. Noyb contends that X's use of a legitimate interest as a legal basis for its data collection and use may not be valid. The company cites a ruling by the top court of Europe last summer, which held that user consent is mandatory for similar cases involving data usage to target ads.
The report outlines further concerns that providers of generative AI systems are frequently claiming they are unable to comply with other key GDPR requirements, such as the right to be forgotten, or the right to access personal data that has been collected. OpenAI's ChatGPT is also being widely criticized for many of the same concerns specifically related to GDPR.
