Twitter, owned by Elon Musk, has received a series of complaints for privacy violations in the European Union. The platform is accused of using user data to train artificial intelligence models without their consent.
The case came to light when a Twitter user discovered that the social network was processing information from European users’ posts to train its chatbot Grok, which caught the attention of the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC), responsible for overseeing compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
The GDPR requires that any use of personal data must have a valid legal basis. However, Twitter, which handles data from 60 million people in the EU, seems to have relied on “legitimate interest” to justify the use of this information. This situation has not been well received by data protection authorities from nine European countries, including Spain, who have filed complaints against the platform alleging that Twitter did not comply with the GDPR requirements by not obtaining explicit consent from users.
Max Schrems, president of the organization NOYB, which supports the complaints, states that “companies must request user consent before using their data.” Although Twitter allowed users to opt out, this happened after several months of data processing without prior notification.
