Brazil's data protection watchdog, Autoridade Nacional de Proteção de Dados (ANPD), has temporarily barred Meta from processing users' personal data to train the company's artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms.
The ANPD said it discovered "evidence of processing of personal data based on inadequate legal hypothesis, lack of transparency, limitation of the rights of data subjects, and risks to children and adolescents."
The move follows the social media giant's modification to its rules that enable it to access public information from Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram for AI training purposes.
A recent investigation released by Human Rights Watch discovered that LAION-5B, one of the biggest image-text datasets used to train AI models, contains linkages to identifying photographs of Brazilian children, placing them at danger of malevolent deepfakes that might bring them under even greater abuse and suffering.
Brazil has over 102 million active users, making it one of the biggest marketplaces. The ANPD highlighted the Meta update breaches the General Personal Data Protection Law (LGBD) and has "the imminent risk of serious and irreparable or difficult-to-repair damage to the fundamental rights of the affected data subjects."
Meta has five working days to comply with the ruling, or face paying daily penalty of 50,000 reais (about $8,808).
In a statement shared with the Associated Press, the business stated the policy "complies with privacy laws and regulations in Brazil," and that the verdict is "a step backwards for innovation, competition in AI development and further delays bringing the benefits of AI to people in Brazil."
The social media business has experienced similar resistance in the European Union (E.U.), leading it to postpone plans to train its AI models using data from users in the area without gaining express approval from users.
Last week, Meta's president of global relations, Nick Clegg, stated that the E.U. is "no longer a fertile ground for innovation and world-class companies," adding the "era of generative AI presents an opportunity to change the story."
The revelation comes as Cloudflare has introduced a new "one-click" solution that prohibits AI bots from scraping its customers' websites for material to train large language models (LLMs).
"This feature will automatically be updated over time as we see new fingerprints of offending bots we identify as widely scraping the web for model training," the web infrastructure business stated.
