Italy Blocks ChatGPT over Privacy Concerns

Regulators in Italy temporarily banned ChatGPT due to privacy concerns, noting that they had opened an investigation into how OpenAI, the US tech firm behind the chatbot, uses data.

Italy’s data protection agency announced that users lacked information about the collection of their data and that a breach at ChatGPT had been reported.

“There appears to be no legal basis underpinning the massive collection and processing of personal data in order to ‘train’ the algorithms on which the platform relies,” the agency said.

In like manner, the Italian regulator expressed concerns over the lack of age verification for ChatGPT users.

It argued that this “exposes children to receiving responses that are absolutely inappropriate to their age and awareness.” The platform is supposed to be for users older than 13, it highlighted.

Furthermore, the data protection agency stated that OpenAI would be barred from processing the data of Italian users until it “respects the privacy regulation.”

This week, some of the biggest names in tech, including Elon Musk, called for AI labs to stop the training of the most powerful AI systems for at least six months, citing “profound risks to society and humanity.”