Elon Musk 's social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter), is under investigation by Ireland's Data Protection Commission (DPC). The privacy watchdog is probing the micro-blogging site for its use of publicly accessible posts of European users to train its artificial intelligence chatbot, Grok . The DPC is examining whether this data processing complies with the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), focusing on the lawfulness and transparency of the practice. As X's European headquarters are located in Dublin, the Irish regulator serves as its lead authority within the EU and has the power to impose fines of up to 4% of a company's global revenue for significant violations. This inquiry follows previous legal actions where X agreed to cease using EU user data for AI training without explicit consent, leading to the dismissal of earlier court proceedings.
What Irish DPC said about investigating Elon Musk’s X
In a statement to the Irish Independent, DPC said: “The inquiry will examine compliance with a range of key provisions of the GDPR, including with regard to the lawfulness and transparency of the processing.”
Implemented in 2018, the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) imposes stringent rules on how organisations handle personal data. Under this regulation, companies must ensure that personal data is processed lawfully, fairly, and transparently, with clear limitations on its use and storage.
“Like other modern LLMs, the Grok LLMs have been developed and trained on a wide variety of data. This inquiry considers a range of issues concerning the use of a subset of this data which was controlled by X Internet Unlimited Company - namely personal data comprised in publicly accessible posts posted on the ‘X’ social media platform by EU/EEA users,” the watchdog added.
DPC further noted: “The purpose of this inquiry is to determine whether this personal data was lawfully processed in order to train the Grok LLMs. The decision to conduct the inquiry under Section 110 of the Data Protection Act 2018, taken by the Commissioners for Data Protection, Dr Des Hogan and Dale Sunderland, was notified to XIUC this week."
What Irish DPC said about investigating Elon Musk’s X
In a statement to the Irish Independent, DPC said: “The inquiry will examine compliance with a range of key provisions of the GDPR, including with regard to the lawfulness and transparency of the processing.”
Implemented in 2018, the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) imposes stringent rules on how organisations handle personal data. Under this regulation, companies must ensure that personal data is processed lawfully, fairly, and transparently, with clear limitations on its use and storage.
“Like other modern LLMs, the Grok LLMs have been developed and trained on a wide variety of data. This inquiry considers a range of issues concerning the use of a subset of this data which was controlled by X Internet Unlimited Company - namely personal data comprised in publicly accessible posts posted on the ‘X’ social media platform by EU/EEA users,” the watchdog added.
DPC further noted: “The purpose of this inquiry is to determine whether this personal data was lawfully processed in order to train the Grok LLMs. The decision to conduct the inquiry under Section 110 of the Data Protection Act 2018, taken by the Commissioners for Data Protection, Dr Des Hogan and Dale Sunderland, was notified to XIUC this week."
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