Advocacy group hits Meta with “cease and desist” letter over AI training

Austrian digital advocacy group Noyb says it’d seek an injunction against Meta if the US tech giant goes ahead with its audacious plans to use Europeans’ personal data to train its artificial intelligence (AI) models.

Noyb is unhappy with Meta – not for the first time – choosing to go ahead with its plans en masse and leaving it to the users to actively seek an opt-out option.

“Instead of asking consumers for opt-in consent, Meta relies on an alleged ‘legitimate interest’ to just suck up all user data,” said the organization in a press release.

Meta has indeed cited a legitimate interest under EU privacy rules for using users’ data to train and develop its generative AI models and other AI tools, which can be shared with third parties.

The US tech giant said last month that users would receive a link to a form where they can object to their data being used for training purposes and that private messages and public data from accounts of users under the age of 18 will not be used in the training.

But noyb, led by privacy activist Max Schrems, criticizes Meta’s rationale. Schrems said in a statement: “The European Court of Justice has already held that Meta cannot claim a ‘legitimate interest’ in targeting users with advertising. How should it have a ‘legitimate interest’ to suck up all data for AI training?”

Probably most importantly, the new EU Collective Redress Directive enables consumers to pursue collective lawsuits and issue EU-wide injunctions against companies working in the bloc.

And noyb is doing precisely that. For now, the organization has sent Meta a formal settlement proposal in the form of a “cease and desist” letter and invited other consumer groups to also take action.

“If you think about the more than 400 million European Meta users who could all demand damages of just €500 or so, you can do the math. We are very surprised that Meta would take this risk just to avoid asking users for their consent,” said Schrems.

Back in April, Meta claimed that the European Data Protection Board had “affirmed” the legality of its plans to restart training its AI tools on EU citizens’ social media posts, and the company was thus “confident” in its compliance with all data protection requirements.

This week, the Verbraucherzentrale North Rhine-Westphalia, a regional data protection authority in Germany, has also officially requested that Meta stop its AI training plans in the EU.