(Vienna) The American social media giant Meta (Facebook, Instagram) was targeted Thursday by complaints in 11 European countries for a plan to “illegally” use the personal data of its users in an artificial intelligence program, according to a press release from the Noyb association.
Bête noire of the technology giants, the Viennese NGO is asking the authorities to intervene “urgently” to prevent the implementation of this new confidentiality policy, scheduled for June 26.
If certain public data is already used to train generative AI models, Meta wants to go further and “completely take” all the data of its billions of users collected since 2007.
The goal: to use it as part of “experimental AI technology without any limits,” says Noyb in his press release.
They basically say that they can use “any data from any source for any purpose and make it available to anyone in the world.”
Max Schrems, founder of the NGO
Will they be used to develop “a simple conversational robot (ChatBot), aggressive personalized advertisements or even a killer drone”: we do not know, he adds.
And all this without asking for the Internet user’s consent, even though it is required by the reference European regulation on data protection (GDPR).
“Once in the system, users seem to have no possibility of having” the data concerning them, the famous digital “right to be forgotten”, according to Noyb.
After these 11 states, including France, Belgium and Germany, procedures will be initiated in other EU countries “in the coming days”.
The Noyb association (for “None of your business”, meaning in English “It is not your business”) is at the origin of numerous complaints against the web giants.
In the case of Meta alone, its actions led to “administrative fines of more than 1.5 billion euros”, she recalls.