Google’s European Bard launch halted by Irish data regulator over privacy concerns

The Irish Data Protection Commission says that it has received no meaningful information yet from the tech giant on the release, other than that it was supposed to launch this week.

Adrian Weckler

Google will have to delay the European launch of its ChatGPT rival, Bard, because the Irish Data Protection Commission says the tech giant hasn’t given enough information about how its privacy would work.

In a statement, the regulator said that it has “not had any detailed briefing nor sight of a data protection impact assessment or any supporting documentation” related to the proposed launch.

All it had received, the watchdog said, was a notice from Google informing it of an intention to launch Bard in the EU this week.

As Google is based in Dublin and is subject to GDPR law, the Irish regulator is responsible for ensuring that it’s compliant with European privacy law.

The DPC “has since sought information [from Google] as a matter of urgency and has raised a number of additional data protection questions with Google to which it awaits a response and Bard will not now launch this week,” the regulator said, in a statement.

“The matter is under ongoing examination by the DPC and we will be sharing information with our fellow [European] DPAs as soon as we receive further answers to our questions.”

Bard was launched in the US in February, and has been released in the UK, but has yet to be fully launched in the EU.

A spokesperson for Google said that tech giant would engage with the Irish DPC on the issue.

“We said in May that we wanted to make Bard more widely available, including in the European Union, and that we would do so responsibly, after engagement with experts, regulators and policymakers,” the spokesperson said.

“As part of that process, we’ve been talking with privacy regulators to address their questions and hear feedback.”

Google is scrambling to catch up with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which has taken the world by storm since its launch late last year.

It’s not the first time that the Irish DPC has halted a major tech release in Europe by a tech giant. Helen Dixon’s office previously delayed Meta launching a dating service in Europe. And the regulator still won’t allow Meta to mingle WhatsApp with Facebook for the purposes of profile-based ads.

The freeze on Bard comes just weeks after the DPC fined Meta €1.2bn and ordered it to stop personal data transfers across the Atlantic.