Meta’s issue isn’t with the still-being-finalized AI Act, but rather with how it can train models using data from European customers while complying with GDPR — the EU’s existing data protection law.
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Meta announced in May that it planned to use publicly available posts from Facebook and Instagram users to train future models. Meta said it sent more than 2 billion notifications to users in the EU, offering a means for opting out, with training set to begin in June.
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Meta says it briefed EU regulators months in advance of that public announcement and received only minimal feedback, which it says it addressed.
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In June — after announcing its plans publicly — Meta was ordered to pause the training on EU data. A couple weeks later it received dozens of questions from data privacy regulators from across the region.
If Meta had ever wanted this to stay in the EU the system would have been designed as Opt-In, not Opt-Out.
This was always going to get pushback.
