Due to concerns about data privacy, the privacy watchdog of the Italian government has temporarily blocked ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence (AI) software chatbot.
This makes Italy the first country to take such action against this widely-used AI chatbot.
The Italian Data Protection Authority has characterized this move as provisional and stated that it will continue until ChatGPT demonstrates respect for privacy. This measure involves temporarily restricting the company’s ability to retain data belonging to Italian users.
According to the watchdog, OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, lacked a legal basis for collecting and storing personal data on a large scale to train the platform’s algorithms.
The watchdog also mentioned a data breach that occurred on March 20, which led to the exposure of user conversations and payment information. OpenAI attributed the problem to a bug.
The Italian watchdog has directed OpenAI to report on the steps it has taken to safeguard user data privacy within 20 days or risk being fined up to $22 million or 4% of its global revenue.
Experts in artificial intelligence (AI) predict that other governments will likely follow Italy’s lead and enact comparable regulations.
Ruta Liepina, an AI fellow at the University of Bologna said:
I think there might be some follow-up from other countries, [especially] if the OpenAI company doesn’t provide more information of how the algorithm is trained.
However, the move is unlikely to affect companies that have already signed licenses to integrate OpenAI into their applications such as Google, Microsoft, Zoom, Duolingo, and several others.
