The president of the Italian Personal Data Protection Authority, which had blocked the ChatGPT artificial intelligence robot at the end of March, declared himself cautiously optimistic, on Tuesday, April 18, regarding the lifting of this blockade on April 30.
“We are ready to reopen ChatGPT on April 30 if there is the will of OpenAI,” the company behind the app, “to take the necessary steps. It seems to me that the company is ready for that, we’ll see,” he said. In an interview with the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera Pasquale Stanzione, president of this independent authority.
The Italian Authority for the Protection of Personal Data had blocked ChatGPT at the end of March “with immediate effect”, which it accuses of not respecting European regulations and of not having a system to verify the age of minor users.
Lack of information
The Authority also criticizes ChatGPT for “the absence of an information note for users whose data is collected by OpenAI, but above all the absence of a legal basis that justifies the massive collection and storage of personal data, for the purpose of training ‘the algorithms that run the platform’.
In addition, although the robot is intended for people over 13 years of age, “the Authority emphasizes that the absence of any filter to verify the age of users exposes minors to no response according to their level of development.”
Following the Italian decision, OpenAI told AFP “to worry about data protection” and ensured compliance with current EU regulations. In his interview on Tuesday, April 18, Pasquale Stanzione reiterated the Authority’s demands.
“And, above all, that users are clearly informed that their data is used for a specific purpose, algorithm training,” added Pasquale Stanzione.
In concrete terms, the Authority “ordered OpenAI to present to it before May 31 an action plan that foresees, no later than September 30, 2023, the implementation of age verification capable of excluding access to at least 13 years,” a press release from the Authority had recently indicated.
OpenAI must, according to the Authority, launch before May 15 “an information campaign on radio, television, newspapers and the internet to inform people about the use of their personal data to train algorithms,” according to the same source.
ChatGPT appeared in November and was quickly taken over by users impressed with their ability to clearly answer difficult questions, write sonnets, or write computer code.
Various surveys in Europe
Funded by the computer giant Microsoft, which has added it to several of its services, it is sometimes presented as a potential competitor to the Google search engine.
On April 13, Spain announced the opening of an investigation into ChatGPT, the same day that the European Union launched a working group to promote European cooperation on the matter.
In France, the Cnil, the French authority for the protection of personal data, has also decided to open “a control procedure”.
Source: BFM TV
