Philippe Dufresne, Canada’s privacy commissioner, has announced the opening of an investigation into X, the social media platform owned by Elon Musk, after receiving a complaint.
The investigation seeks to examine whether the platform has been meeting its obligations under the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA), said in a news release of the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.
The investigation will look into whether X failed to comply with federal privacy law in its collection, use, and disclosure of the personal information of Canadians for the purpose of training artificial intelligence (AI) models, said the news release.
The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada said that it could not give further details regarding the active investigation at the present time, the news release said.
Transparency is crucial: lawmaker
Musk – a tech billionaire, owner of X, and chief executive officer of Tesla – founded xAI, an AI startup, noted an article by Reuters. He bought Twitter in 2022 then gave it its current name, Reuters said.
X made xAI's Grok chatbot available to its users, the Reuters article said. Recently, xAI introduced Grok-3, the latest version of the AI chatbot that is presently being rolled out to X’s Premium+ subscribers, Reuters added.
Brian Masse, an opposition New Democratic Party lawmaker, stated that he recently wrote Dufresne to urge an investigation of X, Reuters reported.
“I'm pleased to see the privacy commissioner agree to launch an investigation into X's use of Canadians' data,” Masse said in a statement, according to Reuters. “Transparency and sunlight are crucial at a time when algorithms could be manipulated to spread misinformation.”
The investigation coincides with heightened tensions between the US and Canada relating to issues of trade, border security, and a digital services tax imposed on US technology firms, Reuters said.
Last week, US President Donald Trump spoke of the implementation of previously proposed 25-percent tariffs on Canadian and Mexican goods beginning Mar. 4, considering the deadly drugs entering the US from those countries, Reuters added.