Vienna, Aug 12 (EFE).- Austrian privacy NGO None of Your Business (Noyb) on Monday said it had filed complaints in nine European countries, accusing X of violating European Union laws by using the data of millions of users without consent to train its artificial intelligence technologies.
The complaints, according to a statement from Noyb, were filed with the data protection authorities of Austria, Belgium, France, Greece, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland and Spain.
The NGO accuses X, controlled by tycoon Elon Musk, of feeding its artificial intelligence technology with personal data from some 60 million European users without informing them or requesting their consent, as required by European laws.
«Recently, Twitter International (now re-branded 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,» the NGO said.
Noyb said it is aware that last week the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) took legal action against X, but considered that that complaint is focused on mitigation measures and not on the main problem: the illegal mass intake of private data.
«The DPC seems to take action around the edges, but shies away from the core problem,” said Noyb chairman and lawyer Max Schrems, known for his campaigns against digital privacy violations.
According to the NGO, most users learned about the AI training through a viral post by an X user on July 26, two months after it began, instead of receiving information or a permission request from the company.
Noyb demanded a «full investigation» into X’s conduct and that numerous questions be answered, such as how the company can separate the data of its European clients from that of other users, and what happened to the data consumed into the systems.
Privacy activists point out that the complaint to the data protection authorities of the nine countries, which must act to defend the rights of their affected nationals, has been made to increase pressure on X to comply with basic aspects of European law.
Finally, Noyb stressed that there was an easy solution that X has not employed: asking 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,» said the NGO. EFE
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