Nine complaints have been filed against X (formerly Twitter) in the European Union after the social media platform began scraping user data to train AI.
A European digital rights advocacy group — the Austrian non-profit, noyb — filed the complaints with data protection authorities in Austria, Belgium, France, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, and Poland.
X quietly changed its user settings in late July so that users’ posts were automatically shared with Elon Musk’s AI startup xAI. X said the data would be used to train xAI’s chatbot Grok. The move immediately caught the attention of a European privacy watchdog, the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC), which took the company to court in Ireland. In response, X stopped scraping Europeans’ X posts.
But nyob called the DPC’s action “half-hearted” because the case “does not seem to go for core violations,” hence its filing of complaints in nine countries. Nyob said it’s trying “to ensure that the core legal problems around Twitter’s AI training are fully addressed.”
“We want to ensure that Twitter fully complies with EU law, which – at a bare minimum – requires to ask users for consent in this case,” said the chairman of nyob, Max Schrems, in the nonprofit’s announcement of the actions.
“Companies that interact directly with users simply need to show them a yes/no prompt before using their data,” he added. “They do this regularly for lots of other things, so it would definitely be possible for AI training as well.”