The popular artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot ChatGPT from OpenAI has reportedly been blocked in Italy. According to Reuters, Italy’s data protection regulator has launched an investigation into ChatGPT due to privacy concerns stemming from a possible violation of data collection rules.
The country’s data protection watchdog has also charged ChatGPT with failing to verify the age of its users, as the service is intended for those who are at least 13 years old. According to the Reuters story, the agency claimed to have temporarily prohibited the use of chatbots for personal data from Italian consumers.
The ruling would “with immediate effect” result in “the temporary limitation of the processing of Italian user data vis-à-vis OpenAI,” according to the Italian Data Protection Authority.
The privacy authority in Italy has declared that it will immediately stop processing data from Italian users for OpenAI, the US-based company that created the widely used AI tool, and launch an investigation. The decree is only in effect until the business complies with the General Data Protection Regulation, a historic EU privacy regulation (GDPR).
It should be noted that there are growing requests to halt additional ChatGPT releases and look into OpenAI, the company behind them, due to a variety of threats to privacy, cybersecurity, and disinformation. This week, dozens of AI professionals and Elon Musk, the newly appointed CEO of Twitter, urged for a halt to ChatGPT improvements.
According to a Politico story, consumer advocacy group BEUC called on EU and national authorities, including data protection watchdogs, to look into ChatGPT on March 30.
It should be mentioned that OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, recently had an incident where a glitch might have allowed some customers’ payment information to get out. To address the problem, the business took ChatGPT offline.
Some users were able to access chat history titles from another current user due to a flaw in the open-source library “redis-py.” If both users were online at the same time, it was also possible for the initial message of a newly started conversation to appear in the chat history of another person.
Moreover, cyber intelligence company CloudSEK found that by accessing Facebook accounts, cybercriminals are utilising ChatGPT’s popularity to spread malware via Facebook adverts.
13 Facebook pages with more than 500,000 followers were found by CloudSEK’s study, some of which were taken over as early as February this year and are now being used to spread the malware through Facebook ads.
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