According to the report made on Wednesday, Italy’s privacy authority will lift the country’s prohibition on ChatGPT provided OpenAI promises to uphold policies safeguarding children and user data by April 30. The authority, known as Garante, outlined a list of “concrete” requests to be fulfilled by the end of this month in a statement on Wednesday.
Garante on March 31, Friday, temporarily curtailed its personal data processing and launched an investigation into a possible violation of privacy laws, prompting Microsoft Corp. backed OpenAI to take ChatGPT offline in Italy. As officials started looking into whether the chatbot had broken Italy’s data privacy regulations and the GDPR of the European Union, the ban was implemented.
The massive language model, which was trained on vast volumes of text extracted from the internet, alarmed officials since it could retain and emit personal information from input inquiries, such as people’s phone numbers and addresses. Users may unintentionally provide OpenAI access to confidential information about themselves or others by divulging it to the chatbot.
The report said, “OpenAI will have to comply by April 30 with the measures set out by the Italian Supervisory Authority (SA) concerning transparency, the right of data subjects including users and non-users and the legal basis of the processing for algorithmic training relying on users’ data.”
It has been mandated that OpenAI must disclose on its website how ChatGPT keeps and uses users’ data and that users verify their age before using the programme. The business must obtain express authorization before using people’s data to train its AI models and must let anybody, user or not, request that any inaccurate personal information produced by ChatGPT be rectified or completely removed.
Moreover, OpenAI must include an age check when registering new users and bar individuals under the age of 13 from using the software. Users between the ages of 13 and 18 must acquire parental permission before using ChatGPT. All these adjustments must be made by September 30 or the prohibition will remain in effect.
The ban on ChatGPT is not the first AI encounter that has happened in the country. Replika, an AI chatbot business, was prohibited by the Italian authorities from collecting users’ personal data in February due to hazards to children and emotionally vulnerable individuals. Although the cited reasons for such regulations are pointing towards privacy, other recent events such as the ban on English language in the country show a political stance they are trying to assert.
Other European privacy watchdogs are taking an interest in the Italian action on ChatGPT and examining if stronger regulations for chatbots are necessary as well as whether to collaborate. The European Union’s privacy watchdog has been tasked by Spain’s data protection body to assess privacy issues related to ChatGPT.