Because of the “risks of serious damage and difficulty to users,” Brazil’s data protection regulator (ANPD) has prohibited Meta from using Brazilian personal data to train its artificial intelligence models. This decision follows Meta’s privacy policy update in May, which permits the social media giant to utilize data from Brazilian public Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram accounts (including posts, photos, and captions) for artificial intelligence training purposes.

The decision was made following a Human Rights Watch study last month that revealed Brazilian children’s identifiable and personal images are included in LAION-5B, one of the largest image-caption datasets used for training AI models, exposing them to the risks of deepfakes and other forms of exploitation.

According to ANPD, the policy poses a “imminent risk of serious and irreparable or difficult-to-repair damage to the fundamental rights” of Brazilian users, as reported by The Associated Press in the nation’s official gazette. With 102 million Brazilian user accounts on Facebook alone, the ANPD lists the region as one of Meta’s major marketplaces. According to the agency’s Tuesday letter, Meta has five working days to abide by the directive or else it will be subject to daily penalty of 50,000 reais, or about $8,808, per day.

In a statement to the AP, Meta described the decision as “a step backwards for innovation, competition in AI development, and further delays in delivering the benefits of AI to people in Brazil,” asserting that its updated policy “complies with privacy laws and regulations in Brazil.” While Meta insists that users can opt-out of having their data used for AI training, the ANPD contends that this process is hindered by “excessive and unjustified obstacles.”

Meta had to halt its ambitions to train its AI models on European Facebook and Instagram posts after facing similar resistance from EU regulators. But in the US, where user privacy regulations are not as strong as they are, Meta has already implemented modified data gathering procedures.