(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 some public data is already used to train generative AI models, Meta wants to go further and “completely take” all the data from its billions of users collected since 2007.
The goal: to use it as part of “an experimental AI technology without any limits,” Noyb says in its press release.
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 requesting the consent of the Internet user, although 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 deleted, 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 association Noyb (for “None of 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.