Meta Suspends AI Tools in Brazil Amid Privacy Policy Dispute

Meta has reportedly suspended its generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools in Brazil after one of the country’s regulators objected to part of the company’s privacy policy.

Earlier in July, Brazil’s National Data Protection Authority (ANPD) suspended the validity of Meta’s new privacy policy, saying the company would have to exclude the section about the processing of personal data for generative AI training, Reuters reported Thursday (July 17).

Meta told Reuters that it will suspend the AI tools in Brazil while it talks with ANPD about this issue, per the report.

This move comes about a month after Meta said it paused its planned launch of its AI assistant, Meta AI, in Europe after the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC), on behalf of the European data protection authorities (DPAs), asked it to delay training its large language models (LLMs) with content shared by adults on Meta’s Facebook and Instagram platforms.

“We are committed to bringing Meta AI, along with the models that power it, to more people around the world, including in Europe,” Meta said in a June 14 update to an earlier blog post. “But, put simply, without including local information we’d only be able to offer people a second-rate experience. This means we aren’t able to launch Meta AI in Europe at the moment.”

On June 6, Vienna-based privacy group NOYB — the European Center for Digital Rights — said it filed complaints with 11 European countries, arguing that Meta’s use of user data in its proposed AI practices violates the European Union’s (EU) General Data Protection Regulator (GDPR).

“Meta is basically saying that it can use ‘any data from any source for any purpose and make it available to anyone in the world,’ as long as it’s done via ‘AI technology,’” NOYB founder Max Schrems said at the time in a press release. “This is clearly the opposite of GDPR compliance.”

Reached for comment by PYMNTS at the time, a Meta spokesperson pointed to a company blog post that said that the company’s approach is “consistent with how other tech companies are developing and improving their AI experiences in Europe.”

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