Meta admits scraping every adult Australian’s public post to train AI, no opt-out

Facebook’s parent company, Meta, has recently come under fire for scraping the public photos, posts, and other data of Australian adult users to train its AI models. The company has admitted that it has no opt-out option for Australians, despite offering such an option to users in the European Union.

At a recent Senate inquiry, Meta’s global privacy director, Melinda Claybaugh, was questioned about the company’s data collection practices. While she initially denied that Meta was harvesting the data of all Australians, she later confirmed that this was indeed the case.

As reported by ABC News, Senator David Shoebridge asked:

“The truth of the matter is that unless you have consciously set those posts to private since 2007, Meta has just decided that you will scrape all of the photos and all of the texts from every public post on Instagram or Facebook since 2007, unless there was a conscious decision to set them on private. That’s the reality, isn’t it?”

Claybaugh answered shortly, “Correct,” acknowledging that accounts of people under 18 weren’t scraped. But when Senator Sheldon asked whether public photos of his own children on his account would be scraped, Claybaugh said they would. What’s more, The Facebook representative didn’t answer if Meta scraped data from previous years of now adult users who were under 18 when they created their accounts.

But wait, there’s more. As I mentioned, you can’t even choose to opt-out if you’re in Australia. “In Europe there is an ongoing legal question around what is the interpretation of existing privacy law with respect to AI training,” Claybaugh said. “We have paused launching our AI products in Europe while there is a lack of certainty. So you are correct that we are offering an opt-out to users in Europe. I will say that the ongoing conversation in Europe is the direct result of the existing regulatory landscape.”

By “Europe,” I believe she means the European Union. So I wonder what happens to the public data of users from countries that aren’t a part of the EU (like my country, for instance).

Senator Shoebridge told the ABC that “there’s a reason that people’s privacy is protected in Europe and not in Australia:

“Iit’s because European lawmakers made tough privacy laws. Meta made it clear today that if Australia had these same laws Australians’ data would also have been protected. The government’s failure to act on privacy means companies like Meta are continuing to monetise and exploit pictures and videos of children on Facebook.”

The government is due to announce long-awaited reforms to the Privacy Act in August. This is in response to a 2020 review that found the current laws outdated. Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus said earlier this year that the legislation would be announced in August.

This revelation has raised concerns about privacy and data protection. While the company argues that it needs a lot of data to provide the most “flexible and powerful” AI tool, critics say this practice violates users’ privacy rights. Honestly, I’d trade any AI image generator for my privacy, but who asks me? After all, you know what they say – “if it’s free, you’re the product.”

[via PetaPixel]

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