The complaints come less than a week after the Irish authorities mounted a similar legal challenge against Musk over a data settings change.

An Austrian non-profit is filing nine complaints against Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence (AI) company for breaching the EU’s data privacy regulations.

In July, users on X, Musk’s social media platform, noticed that a data setting was recently changed so that public posts could be used to train Grok AI, Musk’s answer to OpenAI.

The European Centre for Digital Rights (styled as NOYB for ‘None of your business’) alleges that X made the change “unlawfully” to collect the data of more than 60 million X users in the EU.

“Twitter (X) is the next US company to just suck up EU users’ data to train AI,” NOYB said in a statement.

“Twitter started irreversibly feeding European users’ data into its “Grok” AI technology in May 2024, without ever informing them or asking for their consent,” it said.

The non-profit filed complaints under the EU’s General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) in Austria, Belgium, France, Greece, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and Poland.

What’s in the challenges?

The French complaint from NOYB accuses X of breaching 16 articles of the GDPR regulations because they cannot prove they have a “legitimate interest” in taking such a large volume of personal data.

The social media platform has not disclosed how the data will be treated, which NOYB considers another violation.

On X, users see a new category under their data sharing, privacy and sharing section called “Grok” after the name of Elon Musk’s generative AI model.

“Companies that interact directly with users simply need to show them a yes/no prompt before using their data.”

 Max Schrems, Chairman of European Center for Digital Rights

It asks users whether they want to opt out of sharing posts and interactions, inputs and results with Grok “to be used for training and fine-tuning”.

The opt-out function for providing data “dissuades users from exercising their right to choose,” NOYB’s complaint continues, instead of asking for consent with an “opt-in”.

“The treatment of personal data is very likely irreversible,” NOYB says in the complaint.

It alleges that X will not likely follow the “right to be forgotten rule,” which lets individual users contact platforms to request their data be removed and deleted from online platforms.

The complaint asks France’s National Data Protection Commission (CNIL) to issue an urgent legal decision, conduct an in-depth investigation into X’s data privacy decisions and make it illegal to use personal data to train AI models without an opt-in from the user.

“Companies that interact directly with users simply need to show them a yes/no prompt before using their data,” Max Schrems, Chairman of NOYB, said in a statement.

“They do this regularly for lots of other things, so it would definitely be possible for AI training as well.”

‘Unwarranted, overboard’

The challenges come less than a week after the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) mounted a legal challenge against Musk for the same data settings change, asking the social media platform to immediately suspend, restrict or prohibit the use of personal data in its training.

X announced on 8 August that it would stop using the data to train its AI in the EU but added that the DPC’s order was “unwarranted, overboard and singles out X without any justification,” the social platform’s global governance affairs team said in a post.

“While many companies continue to scrape the web to train AI models with no regards for user privacy, X has done everything it can to give users more control over their data,” it continued.

The company said it will “continue to protect” the privacy rights of its users and “will be pursuing all available avenues” to challenge the DPC order.

In its complaint, NOYB said it’s “hard to know” whether the personal information already collected by X will be treated and how it will be differentiated from data gathered from other countries.

xAI, Musk’s separate AI arm, argues that Grok needs to be trained on X data to “improve (its) understanding of human language, develop its sense of humour and help it stay politically unbiased,” a X help page says.

Euronews Next reached out to X and xAI but didn’t immediately receive a reply.