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Hello all, and happy Thursday! 

By now I’m sure everybody is familiar with the AI chat bot ChatGPT. People have been using ChatGPT for everything from writing essays to building a business—but not in Italy. The Italian data protection authority, Garante, recently banned the use of ChatGPT temporarily due to its unlawful collection of Italian citizens’ data. OpenAI has disabled access to its chatbot in Italy as a result. 

As the public’s first experience with large language models (LLMs), ChatGPT has been processing a large amount of Italian citizens’ personal data, all without the appropriate legal basis under the GDPR to do so.  

If OpenAI wishes to allow Italians to access the tool again, they’ll need to obtain one of the GDPR’s six legal bases: consent, contract, legal obligation, vital interests, public task, or legitimate interests. Most businesses rely on consent for a legal basis, but its hard to see how that would work with an LLM like ChatGPT. LLMs are trained on a body of text sourced from books, articles, websites, digital content, and more; it’s not like OpenAI can request consent from everybody who has ever written anything online. 

If ChatGPT implemented a privacy-by-design approach to their technology and carefully curated the training data to exclude personal information, then there is a possibility that they could remain compliant with the GDPR. But that seems like a tall order. AI models cannot function without access to enough data and enough of the right kind of data—it’ll be interesting to see if a corpus of fully anonymized information can be used to train an LLM like ChatGPT. 

Best, 

Arlo 

P.S. G2’s Spring Awards have come out recently, and we’re pleased to announce that Osano has been rated best-in-class for consent management and a rising star in both DSAR and data privacy platforms! If you’ve enjoyed your experience using Osano, why not hop over to G2 and leave us a review? 

G2 Spring 2023 email


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