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 improved multilingual, reasoning, and coding capabilities. It was unveiled by the company in May 2023.

With Google's European headquarters based in Dublin, the DPC acts as the primary regulator responsible for making sure the company abides by the bloc's stringent data privacy rulebook.

The DPC said an inquiry is crucial to ensure that individuals' fundamental rights and freedoms are safeguarded, especially when processing of such data when developing AI systems can lead to a "high risk."

The development comes weeks after social media platform X permanently agreed not to train its AI chatbot, Grok, using the personal data it collected from European users without obtaining prior consent. Back in August, the DPC said X consented to suspend 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 admitted to scraping every Australian adult Facebook user's public data to train its AI system, has paused its plans to use content posted by European users following a request from the DPC over privacy concerns. It has also suspended the use of generative AI (GenAI) in Brazil after the country's data protection authority issued a preliminary ban objecting to its new privacy policy.

Last year, Italy's data privacy regulator also temporarily banned OpenAI's ChatGPT because of concerns that its practices are in violation of data protection laws in the region.