Google plans to launch its smart chatbot in the European Union on Thursday after addressing concerns raised by the Irish Data Protection Commission, the regulator told POLITICO.
“Google has made several changes in advance [the] set up, especially the increase and the change in the behavior of the users, “deputy commissioner and spokesman for Ireland Graham Doyle said in a statement.
The US tech giant in June delay the release of its competitor OpenAI’s ChatGPT after the Irish regulator said the company had not provided sufficient information on how its tool respected EU privacy rules, General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The Irish director is Google’s data controller in the EU because the US company has its headquarters in Europe.
“We will continue to engage with Google in relation to the implementation of Bard and Google has agreed to review and report to the DPC after three months of Bard being operational in the EU,” Doyle said.
Google declined to comment Wednesday evening.
Bard’s main competition, ChatGPT, it was temporarily banned in Italy in March on anxiety may violate privacy policies. ChatGPT is being investigated in several countries such as Spain and Germany. European data protection agencies are currently looking into privacy issues raised by artificial intelligence tools under the umbrella of the European Data Protection Board (EDPB).
Google’s decision in June to delay the implementation of Bard in the EU is the latest example of US companies withdrawing from the bloc.
Facebook parent company Meta earlier this month started Threadsits rival to the microblogging platform Twitter, in more than a hundred countries but backed off from releasing the platform to the European Union “due to the uncertainty of the future” related to the law of digital competition, the Digital Markets Act, POLITICO previously reported.