(Bloomberg) -- The Irish Data Protection Commission has opened an inquiry into whether Alphabet Inc.’s Google complied with European Union privacy laws in the development of its artificial intelligence model.
The DPC said in a statement on Thursday that the probe will look at whether Google carried out a data protection impact assessment, as required by the bloc’s sweeping General Data Protection Regulation, before it processed EU residents’ personal data used in its Pathways Language Model 2 (PaLM 2) foundational model.
Google’s YouTube is also among the platforms targeted by an inquiry opened Thursday by a separate Irish regulator into whether they are effectively dealing with illegal content online.
Big Tech companies have been drawing increasing scrutiny from regulators over how they process personal data and handle harmful content online. The EU has passed a number of laws that place guardrails to limit their activities in the bloc, including the world’s most extensive AI rules.
Many Big Tech companies have their European headquarters in Ireland, which means that local regulators including the DPC are tasked with enforcing EU rules.
“We take seriously our obligations under the GDPR and will work constructively with the DPC to answer their questions,” a spokesperson for Google in Ireland said in an email.
Earlier this month, Elon Musk’s X Corp. agreed to stop processing the personal information of European users to train its AI chatbot Grok. It followed the DPC’s filing of a request with Ireland’s High Court to stop X from processing the data for use in the company’s AI model, citing EU data protection restrictions and alleging that X’s action risked jeopardizing users’ rights.
The DPC also asked the EU-level European Data Protection Board to start a discussion on the interplay between data protection and AI model training – an issue that has in recent months given rise to disputes between data watchdogs and tech companies, including X and Meta Platforms, Inc.
The second probe, opened by Ireland’s regulator responsible for enforcing the EU’s Digital Service Act, Coimisiún na Meán, seeks to determine compliance with a sweeping set of rules that require large online platforms to do more to tackle illegal content. The commission is examining the content reporting mechanisms of twelve online platforms including Google’s YouTube, TikTok, X and LinkedIn, it said in a statement.
(Updates with details on second inquiry and Google comment)
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