Meta said it was “disappointed” by the request.

Meta is putting plans for its AI assistant on hold in Europe after receiving objections from Ireland’s privacy regulator, the company announced on Friday.

In a blog post, Meta said the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) asked the company to delay training its large language models on content that had been publicly posted to Facebook and Instagram profiles.

Meta said it is “disappointed” by the request, “particularly since we incorporated regulatory feedback and the European [Data Protection Authorities] have been informed since March.”** **Per the Irish Independent, Meta had recently begun notifying European users that it would collect their data and offered an opt-out option in an attempt to comply with European privacy laws.

  • @talEnglish
    3•15 days ago

    Thanks. That also kind of drives home the “I’m sure that third parties are scraping data and analyzing it too” thing:

    Facebook’s decision won’t stop independent companies like Clearview AI — which built huge image databases by scraping photos from social networks, including Facebook — from using facial recognition algorithms trained with that data. US law enforcement agencies (alongside other government divisions) work with Clearview AI and other companies for facial recognition-powered surveillance.