Elon Musk's X hit with data privacy concerns across Europe

Tech billionaire Elon Musk's social media platform, X, faces complaints over "unlawfully" feeding the personal data of users into its artificial intelligence (AI) technology without their consent.

The complaints were lodged against the social media platform on Monday by a Vienna-based privacy campaign group, called the European Center for Digital Rights which is also known as "None of Your Business" (Noyb), AFP reported.

The complaints come after Ireland's Data Protection Commission (DPC), earlier this month, took court action against X over its data collection practices to train its AI.

According to Noyb, X had recently started "irreversibly feeding" the personal data of more than 60 million European users into its Grok AI technology, "without ever informing them or asking for their consent".

Noyb slammed X for "never proactively informing" its users that their data is being used for AI training, saying many people appeared to have "found out about the new default setting through a viral post on 26 July".

Last week, the DPC, acting on behalf of the European Union (EU), said that X had agreed to suspend its controversial processing of users' personal data for its AI technology.

However, Noyb founder Max Schrems criticised the DPC for not addressing the legality of the actual data processing and taking action "around the edges, not at the core of the problem".

Noyb also warned about the fate of EU data that had already been processed.

Calling for a "full investigation", Noyb has filed complaints in Austria, Belgium, France, Greece, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain.

The group has requested an "urgency procedure" against X that allows data protection authorities in the eight European countries to act.

"We want to ensure that Twitter (now X) fully complies with EU law, which — at a bare minimum — requires to ask users for consent," Schrems said, referring to the bloc's landmark General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which aims to make it easier for people to control how companies use their personal information.

The group recently launched similar legal action against Meta, causing it to halt its AI plans and has taken several court proceedings against tech giants, often prompting action from regulatory authorities.