Elon Musk’s X hit by complaints to EU over user data and targeted advertising – The Economic Times

Elon Musk’s X social media platform has been hit by complaints by 9 civil society organisations to EU and French regulators over what they are saying is its use of customers’ knowledge for focused promoting that will breach EU tech guidelines.

The organisations – AI Forensics, the Centre for Democracy and Expertise Europe, Entropy, European Digital Rights, Gesellschaft fur Freiheitsrechte e.V. (GFF), International Witness, Panoptykon Basis, Stichting Bits of Freedom and VoxPublic stated they took their criticism to the European Fee and the French media regulator Arcom on Monday.

They urged each regulators to take motion underneath the Digital Services Act (DSA) which prohibits promoting based mostly on delicate person knowledge resembling faith, race and sexuality.

X, the Fee and Arcom didn’t instantly reply to emailed requests for remark.

“We specific our deep concern concerning the use by X of customers’ delicate private knowledge for focused ads,” the organisations stated in an announcement.

They stated their considerations have been triggered after they seemed into X’s Advert Repository which is a publicly obtainable database arrange by corporations as a part of a DSA requirement.

“We discovered that main manufacturers in addition to public and monetary establishments engaged in focused internet marketing based mostly on what look like particular classes of non-public knowledge, protected by Article 9 of the GDPR, resembling political views, sexual orientation, non secular beliefs and well being situations,” they stated.

The group referred to as on the regulators to analyze X. GDPR refers back to the EU knowledge privateness regulation.