Social RoboticsItaly's privacy regulator orders Replika to stop processing Italian users' data
The watchdog cited risks to children and emotionally vulnerable people and the absence of age checks in the AI companion app.
Italy's data protection authority barred Luka Inc, the US developer of the Replika companion chatbot, from using the personal data of Italian users. The regulator said the app's mood-influencing features could pose risks to minors and emotionally fragile people, and that it had no meaningful way to verify users' ages. Luka was given 20 days to report on its response and faced fines of up to 20 million euros or 4% of global turnover. It was one of the first regulatory actions aimed squarely at an AI companion, and it set a precedent for how European law may treat emotionally engaging conversational agents, embodied or not.
Source: Euronews (Reuters)
This archive entry summarises reporting published elsewhere; follow the source link for the full story. The summary was drafted with AI from that reporting.