Meta AI launches European expansion amid regulatory hurdles
Starting this week, the Meta AI chatbot will begin its rollout in 41 European countries as announced by Meta on Thursday. In mid-2024, following intervention by the Irish regulator, Meta paused its plans to deploy this tool.
This week, the company announced that the Meta AI assistant will be available in over 60 markets, including 41 European countries. This represents Meta AI's most significant global expansion to date.
As communicated, the first available feature of Meta AI will be an intelligent chatbot, currently available in six European languages: English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and German. The chatbot will be accessible for free on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger.
Meta explained that users can use it through direct messaging to ask questions, explore interesting topics, or seek help in solving problems. The company added that the assistant can also be used in group chats—initially on WhatsApp, with subsequent plans to introduce the feature on Messenger and in private messages on Instagram.
Meta announced that the AI would also be integrated into search bars across its platforms, allowing it to provide "best-matching" results from various sources, such as reels, photos, and posts from friends and followers.
Meta stated that the objective is to make its artificial intelligence tool available on a par with the U.S. and intends to "gradually" expand its offering across European countries.
Enabling Europeans access to Meta AI technology took significantly longer than the company had planned. The delay was attributed to the European Union's complex regulatory system, according to the tech giant.
In the first half of 2024, Meta notified selected Facebook and Instagram users about the new AI policy and the potential use of, for instance, users' posts for training purposes. The Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC), where Meta's European activities are registered, raised concerns at that time about training AI on data obtained from European users' posts, photos, and captions published on Facebook and Instagram.
Meta offered the option to object to the new policy, but a unique form (opt-out) had to be completed. Some experts, including the non-governmental organisation Noyb, which deals with data protection, argued that such a practice conflicts with GDPR. Noyb described Meta’s opt-out form as "a farce." They also criticised Meta's retention of the right to disregard objections.
The organisation highlighted that tech giants' practices included many "dormant" Facebook accounts, with which users scarcely interacted but still contained considerable amounts of personal data. In June 2024, Noyb lodged 11 complaints related to Meta AI with data protection authorities in various EU countries, including Poland’s Personal Data Protection Office (UODO).
Implementation of the new tool in the EU faces challenges
Following intervention by the Irish Data Protection Commission, Meta has halted the AI training on information from Facebook and Instagram users within the European Union. The Irish Commission, representing several European authorities in this matter, expressed satisfaction with this decision. It was simultaneously announced that discussions with the tech companies would continue.
"We’re disappointed by the request from the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC), our lead regulator, on behalf of the European DPAs, to delay training our large language models (LLMs) using public content shared by adults on Facebook and Instagram — particularly since we incorporated regulatory feedback and the European DPAs have been informed since March," Meta stated in a report released in early June 2024. The company further noted that Meta AI "at this point" will not proceed with deployment in the European Union.
"We are honouring all European objections. If an objection form is submitted before Llama training begins, then that person’s data won’t be used to train those models, either in the current training round or in the future," Meta assured in June 2024.
Meta Platforms is an American corporation that owns social media and communication platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp. Meta AI is the research division of Meta Platforms that develops artificial intelligence and augmented reality (AR) technologies. In 2023, Meta AI launched a family of large language models under the name Llama, which has been updated multiple times since then.
