Meta Platforms will not launch its Meta AI models in Europe for now after the Irish privacy regulator told it to delay its plan to harness data from Facebook and Instagram users, the U.S. social media company said on Friday, Reuters reported.
The move by Meta came after complaints and a call by advocacy group NYOB to data protection authorities in Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland and Spain to act against the company.
At issue is Meta’s plan to use personal data to train its artificial intelligence (AI) models without seeking consent, although the company has said it would use publicly available and licensed online information.
Meta on Friday said the Irish privacy watchdog had asked it to delay training its large language models (LLM’s) using public content shared by Facebook and Instagram adult users.
“We’re disappointed by the request from the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC), our lead regulator, on behalf of the European DPAs … particularly since we incorporated regulatory feedback and the European DPAs have been informed since March,” the company said in an updated blogpost.
The Irish Data Protection Commission wrote:
The DPC’s Engagement with Meta On AI
The DPC welcomes the decision by Meta to pause its plans to train its large language model using public content shared by adults on Facebook and Instagram across the EU/EEA. This decision followed intensive engagement between the DPC and Meta. The DPC, in co-operation with its fellow EU data protection authorities, will continue to engage with Meta on the issue.
The Verge reported Meta is putting plans for its AI assistant on hold in Europe after receiving objections from Ireland’s privacy regulator, the company announced on Friday.
In a blog post, Meta said the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) asked the company to delay training its large language models on content that had been publicly posted to Facebook and Instagram profiles.
Meta said it is “disappointed” by the request, “particularly since we incorporated regulatory feedback and the European [Data Protection Authorities] have been informed since March,” Per the Irish Independent. Meta had recently begun notifying European users that it would collect their data and offered an opt-out option in an attempt to comply with European privacy laws.
According to The Verge, Meta said it will “continue to work collaboratively with the DCP.” But its blog post says that Google and OpenAI have “already used data from Europeans to train AI” and claims that if regulators don’t let it use users’ information to train its models, Meta can only deliver an inferior product.
“Put simply, without including local information we’d only be able to offer people a second-rate experience. This means we aren’t able to launch Meta AI in Europe at the moment.”
In my opinion, I don’t think it should be legal for companies (like Meta and others) to scrape data off of social media platforms and feed it to their AI. It will never be ok to scrape other people’s posts – unless Meta pays a significant amount of money to the users they are stealing from.