Google AI model under scrutiny as EU launches probe over data privacy

Ireland's Data Protection Commission (DPC), the European Union’s top data privacy regulator, wants to check if Google complied with the bloc’s rules when developing its PaLM 2 language model.

The DPC launched a cross-border inquiry into Google to determine whether the tech behemoth complied with obligations under the General Data Protection Regulation’s (GDPR) Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA).

This mouthful of legal terms and acronyms means that the EU wants to know how Google fed EU citizens’ data into its Pathways Language Model 2 (PaLM 2). The DPIA demands do’s and don’ts of data processing and assesses whether something endangers EU citizens' freedoms and rights.

The DPC says that the assessment “is a key process for building and demonstrating compliance, which ensures that data controllers identify and mitigate against any data protection risks arising from a type of processing that entails a high risk.”

The data protection watchdog said that it seeks to ensure that the processing is “necessary and proportionate and that appropriate safeguards are in place in light of the risks.”

According to the DPC, the probe into Google’s AI is part of wider efforts to regulate the processing of personal data of EU and European Economic Area (EEA) subjects, while developing AI models and systems.

In early August, Elon Musk’s X agreed to suspend the processing of personal data to train its Grok AI. In early June, Facebook and Instagram owner Meta paused its plans to train its large language model with Europeans’ data.