On April 6, Italy’s data protection agency said that OpenAI plans to present measures to overcome the concerns that led to the ban of its ChatGPT chatbot application in the country last week.
The Italian Data Protection Authority (also known as Garante) has blocked the activities of ChatGPT chatbots in the country, on the grounds that the artificial intelligence (AI) application developed by OpenAI Company (USA) did not respects user data and cannot verify the user’s age.
Garante said it did not intend to hinder the development of AI, but reiterated the importance of respecting the rules aimed at protecting the personal data of Italian and European citizens.
In an online conference late Wednesday attended by CEO Sam Altman, Garante said that OpenAI is committed to being more transparent about how it handles user data and verifying users’ ages. It said it would send Garante a document regarding the measures to meet Italy’s requirements.
Despite critics of Garante’s ChatGPT ban (including Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini), France, Germany and Ireland are also investigating OpenAI over the same issue.
Matteo Salvini on April 2 criticized Garante’s decision to temporarily ban ChatGPT. He said that suppressing privacy concerns seemed excessive.
“I find the decision of the Privacy Watchdog to block access to ChatGPT from Italy inappropriate,” wrote Matteo Salvini, leader of the ruling League party, on Instagram.
ChatGPT, short for Chat Generative Pre-training Transformer, is a chatbot developed by the American company OpenAI and launched in November 2022.
In early February, Garante stated that Luka would have to notify the authorities of this country about the measures to “rectify” Replika within 20 days, and warned Luka could be fined up to 20 million euros or up to 4%. annual global revenue related to the above issues.
Additionally, since OpenAI has no main establishment in the EU, any of the bloc’s data protection authorities are empowered to regulate ChatGPT — which means all other EU member countries’ authorities could choose to step in and investigate — and issue fines for any breaches they find (in relatively short order, as each would be acting only in their own patch). So it’s facing the highest level of GDPR exposure, unprepared to play the forum shopping game other “tech giants” have used to delay privacy enforcement in Europe.