Google is set to roll out its artificial intelligence chatbot Bard in European Union Thursday after resolving concerns raised by the Irish Data Protection Commission, the regulator told POLITICO.
“Google have made a number of changes in advance of [the] launch, in particular increased transparency and changes to controls for users,” the Irish regulator’s deputy commissioner and spokesperson Graham Doyle said in a statement.
The U.S. technology giant in June delayed the release of its competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT after the Irish regulator said the company had given insufficient information about how its tool respected the EU’s privacy rules, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The Irish watchdog is Google’s main data regulator in the EU because the U.S. firm has its European headquarters there.
“We will be continuing our engagement with Google in relation to Bard post-launch and Google have agreed to carrying out a review and providing a report to the DPC after three months of Bard becoming operational in the EU,” Doyle said.
Google declined to comment Wednesday evening.
Bard’s main competitor, ChatGPT, was banned temporarily in Italy in March over concerns it could violate privacy standards. ChatGPT is under investigation in several countries like Spain and Germany. European data protection agencies currently are scrutinizing the various privacy issues that generative AI tools raise under the umbrella of the European Data Protection Board (EDPB).
Google’s decision in June to postpone launching Bard in the EU is a recent example of U.S. tech firms holding off on rolling out products in the bloc.
Facebook’s parent company Meta earlier this month launched Threads, its rival to microblogging platform Twitter, in more than a hundred countries but held back on rolling out the platform in the European Union “because of upcoming regulatory uncertainty” linked to the incoming digital competition law, the Digital Markets Act, POLITICO reported earlier.
