ChatGPT has been reinstated in Italy following the fulfilment of Garante, Italy’s data protection agency, requirements ahead of the April 30, 2023, compliance date.
OpenAI told customers that it filters and eliminates sensitive material such as hate speech, pornographic content, and spam, and that it does not actively seek personal information to train its models. It did, however, accept that ChatGPT answers may contain personal information about public personalities and other persons whose information is publicly available on the internet.
European users who desire to object to such processing of their personal information may do so by completing an online form, and they may also exercise their right to update, limit, delete, or transfer their personal information contained within its training dataset.
OpenAI also agreed to offer an option to validate users’ ages before getting access to ChatGPT to prove they are over the age of 18 or, if between the ages of 13 and 18, have gotten the agreement of parents or guardians. It also added a new privacy setting that allows users to disable chat history, as well as an export option to access the data held by ChatGPT.
Garante applauded OpenAI’s efforts to comply with data protection laws and urged the company to implement additional safeguards such as an age verification system and information campaigns. This will educate Italians about what happened and their rights to opt out of the processing of their personal data for training algorithms.
The sources for this piece include an article in TheHackerNews.
