Italy’s privacy watchdog bans ChatGPT over data breach concerns

Italy's privacy watchdog has temporarily banned ChatGPT, after raising concerns about a recent data breach and the legal basis for using personal data to train the popular chatbot.

The Italian Data Protection Authority described the move as a provisional measure "until ChatGPT respects privacy". The watchdog said it was imposing an "immediate temporary limitation on the processing of Italian users' data" by ChatGPT's owner, the San Francisco-based OpenAI.

ChatGPT has been a sensation since its launch last November due to its ability to generate plausible-sounding responses to questions, as well as creating an array of content including poems, academic essays and summaries of lengthy documents when prompted by users.

It is powered by a groundbreaking artificial intelligence system that is trained on a vast amount of information culled from the internet.

The Italian watchdog cited concerns about how the chatbot processed information in its statement.

It referred to "the lack of a notice to users and to all those involved whose data is gathered by OpenAI" and said there appears to be "no legal basis underpinning the massive collection and processing of personal data in order to 'train' the algorithms on which the platform relies".

The Italian watchdog also referred to a data breach suffered by OpenAI on 20 March, which partly exposed conversations and some users' personal details including email addresses and the last four digits of their credit cards.