Before relaxing restrictions, the Italian government establishes rigorous requirements for OpenAI's ChatGPT, including enhanced transparency and age verification steps to protect user privacy.
The procedures that OpenAI must take to remove an order placed on ChatGPT have been described by Italy's data protection body, Garante. In March 2023, the order was issued. The watchdog suspected the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot service of breaking the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) of the European Union and ordered the US-based company to stop processing data belonging to individuals residing in the nation.
The regulator's news release, OpenAI must boost its transparency and issue an information notice describing its data processing procedures in detail. Furthermore, the statement asks OpenAI to immediately install age-gating mechanisms to prohibit minors from using its technologies and to use more strict age verification procedures.
OpenAI must clarify the legal basis it uses to process individuals' data in order to train its AI, and it cannot depend on contract performance. This means that OpenAI must decide whether to seek user consent or rely on legitimate interests. OpenAI's privacy policy now refers to three legal basis, however it appears to place more emphasis on contract performance when offering services such as ChatGPT.
Furthermore, OpenAI must allow users and non-users to exercise their personal data rights, such as asking corrections for any inaccuracies generated by ChatGPT or deleting their data.
Furthermore, the regulatory agency demanded that OpenAI allow users to object to the use of their data for the purpose of training its algorithms. In addition, OpenAI is obligated to run an awareness campaign in Italy to tell people that their data is being used to train AIs.
Garante has set an April 30 deadline for OpenAI to fulfill the majority of these tasks. OpenAI has been given more time to meet the additional demand of transitioning from the existing, age-gating child safety technology to a more resilient age verification system.
OpenAI, in particular, has until May 31 to submit a plan describing the adoption of age verification technology that screens out individuals under the age of 13 (as well as those between the ages of 13 and 18 who have not secured parental approval). The deployment of this more robust system is scheduled for September 30.
Following the national data protection agency's worries about probable privacy violations and failure to check user age, Microsoft-backed OpenAI put ChatGPT offline in Italy on Friday, March 31.
