Bard in the European Union?

Bard, Google's AI (artificial intelligence) chatbot, is already available in 180 countries, but not in the EU. When you surf to Bard, you get a message that Bard is not supported. But why not? The EU negotiator on the new AI legislation calls Bard's absence a major problem, saying he doesn't know why Bard is not available in the EU. But Google remains vague, saying it wants to roll out Bard gradually and responsibly.
However, Google is probably afraid that the chatbot does not comply with current European privacy regulations. Chatbots are trained with large amounts of information from the web, including personal data. That is not prohibited in itself, but what can be a problem is the mandatory transparency about exactly which information has been used.
An important difference with competitor ChatGPT is that the standard version of Bard has access to current information. If you ask the free version of ChatGPT who is the 2023 football champion of the Netherlands, you will get the answer that the program does not know, because it has no information after September 2021 (the program has been trained with data up to that month).

Invasion of privacy

The Italian regulator previously blocked ChatGPT for privacy violations, partly because it is not clear what data it collects for training purposes. It could be that Google wants to prevent something like that. Because today it was also announced that the EU has fined Meta no less than 1.2 billion euros ($ 1.3 billion) for transferring data from European Facebook users to servers in the US. This is the largest fine imposed on a technology company to date.
However, Bard can be used via a detour, namely via a VPN connection. This allows you to pretend that you live in England, for example, and bypass the blockade. For regular users, Google promises that Bard can be used in the EU, but it cannot say when this will be the case.