Facebook’s parent company Meta has been forced to delay the rollout of its AI services in Europe due to privacy concerns and regulatory hurdles. Meta confirmed the news in a blog update that was originally published to defend its opposition to the AI plans.
Meta had been in the process of introducing a new privacy policy for how it would use people’s data to train AI models. The new terms, which would allow Instagram and Facebook user data collected since 2007 to be used to train AI models, faced legal action in 11 European countries and were strongly opposed by authorities, including the Irish Data Protection Commission.
Facebook’s parent company, Meta, has been forced to delay the rollout of its AI services in Europe. [+] Privacy concerns and regulatory barriers.
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Meta cited legitimate interests under the EU General Data Protection Act as the basis for its actions, as the data it used was information that users had chosen to make public on their social media profiles.
Now the company has been forced to stop collecting this data, saying that without including this local information “we’re only giving people a second-rate experience.”
“We are disappointed that our lead regulator, the Irish Data Protection Commission, on behalf of the European DPAs, has asked us to delay training our large language models (LLMs) with public content shared by adults on Facebook and Instagram, particularly as we have taken regulators’ feedback into account and notified European Data Protection Authorities (DPAs) since March,” Mehta wrote in a blog post.
They said the move was a “setback for European innovation and competition in AI development” and would “further delay bringing the benefits of AI to Europeans.”
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Meta’s competitors use data to train AI
Meta highlighted that rivals such as Google and OpenAI also use data to train AI models: “AI training is not exclusive to our service, and we are more transparent than many others in the industry.”
Facebook’s parent company has a good argument: training AI models requires vast amounts of data, regardless of who is providing the solution, but Facebook holds vast amounts of historical data from billions of users and also has a reputation for violating data privacy.
Jake Moore, global cybersecurity advisor at ESET, said artificial intelligence algorithms require “enormous amounts of data” to process and produce output for human consumption.
“Meta has access to vast amounts of personal data, but data regulations may stipulate delays if users have not given permission for their data to be analysed for this purpose,” Moore said.
Every time we interact with an AI program, Moore says, it’s “likely to gather and analyze what’s available to it and fine-tune its processing,” so it’s important to stay vigilant about how easily your personal data can be used.
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Will Meta AI be launched in Europe?
It would be a mistake to think that Meta won’t roll out its AI services in Europe: the company says it is “committed to bringing Meta AI and the models that power it to more people around the world, including in Europe.”
Meta also said it needs the data to deliver a functional product: “Without training our models on public content, such as public posts and comments that Europeans share on our service and other services, our models and the AI capabilities they power will not be able to accurately understand important regional language, culture and trending topics on social media,” Mehta said.
Mehta believes that “complexity, inconsistency and uncertainty” in the application of regulations in the EU “risk Europeans falling further behind other countries in the adoption of new technologies.”
The company also stressed its “transparent approach” and said it remains committed to “putting AI in the hands of more people around the world, including in Europe.”
But this raises questions for Facebook users in other parts of the world. Europe and the UK have very strict data protection regulations and prioritize consumer privacy. The US is also starting to embrace this ethos, but it is still far behind the EU in data protection.
