RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — Brazil’s national data protection authority ruled Tuesday that Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, cannot use data originating in the country to train its artificial intelligence.
Meta’s updated privacy policy allows the company to feed people’s public posts into its AI systems. However, this practice will not be allowed in Brazil.
The decision stems from the “imminent risk of serious and irreparable or difficult to repair damage to the fundamental rights of affected data subjects,” the agency said in the country’s official gazette.
Brazil is one of Meta’s biggest markets. Facebook alone has about 102 million active users in the country, the agency said in a statement. The nation has a population of 203 million, according to the 2022 census.
A spokesperson for Meta said in a statement that the company is “disappointed” and insists that its method “complies with Brazilian privacy laws and regulations.”
“This is a step back for innovation, competition in AI development and further delays bringing the benefits of AI to people in Brazil,” the spokesperson added.
The social media company has also faced resistance to updating its privacy policy in Europe, where it recently put on hold its plans to start feeding people’s public posts into AI training systems – which was supposed to start this week past.
In the US, where there is no national law protecting online privacy, such training is already happening.
Meta said on its Brazilian blog in May that it could “use information that people have shared publicly about Meta’s products and services for some of our AI-generating features,” which could include “public posts or photos and captions Theirs”.
Refusal to participate is possible, Meta said in that statement. Despite this option, there are “excessive and unjustified obstacles to accessing information and exercising” the right to opt out, the agency said in a statement.
Meta did not provide enough information to allow people to be aware of the potential consequences of using their personal data to develop generative AI, he added.
Meta is not the only company that has sought to train its AI systems on data from Brazilians.
Human Rights Watch published a report last month that found that personal photos of identifiable Brazilian children taken from a large database of online images — pulled from parenting blogs, professional event photographer websites and video-sharing sites like YouTube – were being used to create AI image-generating tools without families’ knowledge. In some cases, those tools have been used to create AI-generated nude images.
Hye Jung Han, a Brazil-based researcher for the rights group, said in an email on Tuesday that the regulator’s action “helps protect children from the worry that their personal data, shared with friends and family on online platforms Flaws can be used to cause damage. return to them in ways that are impossible to predict or defend against”.
But the decision about Meta will “most likely” encourage other companies to refrain from being transparent about their use of data in the future, said Ronaldo Lemos, of the Rio de Janeiro Institute of Technology and Society, a think tank. .
“Meta was severely punished as it was the only Big Tech company to clearly and upfront in its privacy policy announce that it would use data from its platforms to train artificial intelligence,” he said.
Compliance must be demonstrated by the company within five working days of notification of the decision, and the agency imposed a daily fine of 50,000 reais ($8,820) for failure to do so.