Austrian NOYB unveils privacy complaint against ChatGPT

Austrian NOYB unveils privacy complaint against ChatGPT is profiled by BTW Media because public-source evidence links it to internet infrastructure, governance, operational dependencies, or market visibility.

• Austrian advocate NOYB (None Of Your Business) on April 29 accused the AI firm of violating data privacy rules due to inaccurate responses that cannot be corrected.
• NOYB’s complaint came on the heels of a data subject who queried ChatGPT about his date of birth but received incorrect responses, instead of being informed by the chatbot that it lacked the necessary data, which is a violation of data privacy in the EU.
• OpenAI’s ChatGPT struggles with data accuracy since European data protection authorities have investigated ChatGPT.

Austrian advocacy group None Of Your Business (NOYB) filed a privacy complaint against Microsoft-backed startup OpenAI on Monday, citing the company’s failure to correct inaccurate data supplied by its generative AI chatbot, ChatGPT, which may have violated EU privacy regulations.

About complaint

According to NOYB, when the complainant in their case—a public figure as well—asked ChatGPT about his birthday, it kept responding with false information rather than alerting users that it lacked the required information.

The Austrian privacy advocate group also stated that OpenAI’s chatbot denied the complainant’s requests to correct or delete the false response. ChatGPT told the subject that data correction was impossible on the app without clarifying how the data was processed or its sources, further violating the complainant’s privacy rights, which looks less than ideal in light of the EU privacy law.

The complaint alleges that OpenAI is unaware of the data ChatGPT stores or its source and that despite being aware of the problem, the tech firm seems unbothered.

In response to the OpenAI privacy complaint, NOYB data protection lawyer Maartje de Graaf explained that chatbots like ChatGPT do not comply with EU law.

“Making up false information is quite problematic in itself. But when it comes to false information about individuals, there can be serious consequences,” de Graaf said. “It’s clear that companies are currently unable to make chatbots like ChatGPT comply with EU law when processing data about individuals. If a system cannot produce accurate and transparent results, it cannot be used to generate data about individuals. The technology has to follow the legal requirements, not the other way around.”

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Investigations on OpenAI privacy intensifies

ChatGPT, which launched in 2022 and has since amassed over 180 million users worldwide, has ignited a global discourse on the potential uses and hazards of artificial intelligence.

Concerns concerning the absence of laws to stop the dissemination of misleading information, invasions of privacy, infringement of intellectual property, and the production of deepfake audio and video content have been raised by ChatGPTs and other machine learning apps’ explosive growth. As a result, to enable a regulatory approach to some of the urgent issues surrounding AI, the EU passed the AI Act in March 2024.

The privacy complaint that NOYB filed against OpenAI is one of the company’s many legal battles.