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EU’s ChatGPT taskforce offers first look at detangling the AI chatbot’s privacy compliance

A data protection taskforce that's spent over a year considering how the European Union's data protection rulebook applies to OpenAI's viral chatbot,

On transparency obligations, the taskforce appears to accept OpenAI could make use of an exemption (GDPR Article 14(5)(b)) to notify individuals about data collected about them, given the scale of the web scraping involved in acquiring data-sets to train LLMs. So, while Italy’s watchdog made headlines for its swift interventions last year, Ireland’s (now former) data protection commissioner, Helen Dixon, told a Bloomberg conference in 2023 that DPAs shouldn’t rush to ban ChatGPT — arguing they needed to take time to figure out “how to regulate it properly”. While all this may sound pretty wonky it basically means the AI company can now dodge the risk of further decentralized GDPR enforcement — like we’ve seen in Italy and Poland — as it will be Ireland’s DPC that gets to take decisions on which complaints get investigated, how and when going forward.

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