A coalition of businesses, which included Spotify and Meta, denounced the European Union on Thursday for making “fragmented and inconsistent” decisions regarding artificial intelligence (AI) and data privacy.
The companies signed an open letter, along with a number of academics and trade associations, asserting that Europe was already losing ground in the AI era and ran the risk of slipping much further behind.
The signatories demanded that data privacy regulators make “harmonised, consistent, quick and clear decisions” in order to “enable European data to be used in AI training for the benefit of Europeans”.
The letter criticizes previous rulings made in accordance with the General Data Protection Regulation of 2018 (GDPR).
Following criticism from privacy regulators, Meta, the company that owns Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram, recently suspended plans to collect user data from European customers in order to train its AI algorithms.
“In recent times, regulatory decision making has become fragmented and unpredictable, while interventions by the European Data Protection Authorities have created huge uncertainty about what kinds of data can be used to train AI models,” the letter stated.
At the time, a spokesman for the European Commission stated that compliance with data privacy regulations was expected of all EU businesses.
Due to user privacy violations, Meta has been hit with record fines, including one fine under GDPR totaling more than one billion euros.In addition to data privacy regulations, Europe was the first regional group to draft significant legislation—the AI Act, which went into effect earlier this year—with the goal of preventing technological abuses.
Under the pretense of seeking legal clarification, Meta and other tech behemoths have been delaying products for the European market more and more.
Last year, Meta postponed by many months the launch of its Twitter substitute Threads throughout the European Union.
Google has also delayed the distribution of AI technologies in the European Union.
