(Dado Ruvic/Reuters)
The popular artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT from OpenAI has been immediately blocked by Italy’s data protection authorities due to alleged privacy violations.
The chat application ChatGPT “suffered a data breach on March 20 concerning users’ conversations and payment information of subscribers to the paid service,” according to a statement from the Italian National Authority for Personal Data Protection.
The processing of Italian users’ data will temporarily be limited in relation to [ChatGPT’s creator] OpenAI as a result of the ruling, which takes “immediate effect,” the watchdog stated.
Launched in November 2022, ChatGPT has since gained enormous popularity thanks to its users’ praise for its capacity to clearly and concisely explain complex concepts, write in a variety of genres and languages with a human-sounding tone, compose poetry, and even pass tests.
Without technical skills, one can write computer code using ChatGPT.
However, the Italian data protection authority criticized ChatGPT for failing to tell users whose data was taken by OpenAI. Furthermore, it criticized “the lack of a legal basis justifying the collection and mass storage of personal data with the aim of ‘training’ the algorithms that run the platform.”
Even though the robot is only meant for users over the age of 13, “the Authority emphasizes that the absence of any filter to check the age of users exposes minors to responses completely not in accordance with their stage of development,” even though it is designed for users over 13.