The Irish data protection authority, acting on behalf of the European Union, announced on Thursday that it was opening an investigation into Google over its use of European users’ personal data to develop one of its artificial intelligence models.
This investigation must determine “whether Google has respected the obligations it could have had” to carry out “an impact study” intended to guarantee the protection “of the fundamental rights and freedoms of individuals”, writes the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) in a press release.
This obligation arises from the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), established in 2018 by Brussels as a safeguard against the unregulated use of this information by tech giants.
The DPC’s investigation concerns the AI model “Pathways Language Model 2” (PaLM 2), a version launched by Google in 2023 of its language model, these algorithms trained on mountains of data.
The Californian giant then began to deploy in December of the same year a new AI model, Gemini, which was even more advanced.
The Irish data protection authority is competent to act on behalf of the EU because Google’s European headquarters are in Ireland, as are those of many Silicon Valley giants. Their presence is crucial to the country’s economy, and Dublin offers them attractive tax regimes.
The DPC announced earlier this month that social network X has definitively committed to no longer using the personal data of its European users to train its artificial intelligence program.
In June, the American social networking giant Meta (Facebook, Instagram) suspended its plan to use its users’ personal data in an artificial intelligence (AI) program, which was the subject of complaints in 11 European countries.
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