Meta has acknowledged that all text and photos that adult Facebook and Instagram users have publicly published since 2007 have been fed into its artificial intelligence models. Australia’s ABC News reports that Meta’s global privacy director, Melinda Claybaugh, initially rejected claims about user data from 2007 being leveraged for AI training during a local government inquiry about AI adoption before relenting after additional questioning.
“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,” Green Party senator David Shoebridge pushed in the inquiry. “That’s the reality, isn’t it?”
“Correct,” Claybaugh responded.
Meta’s privacy center and blog posts acknowledge hoovering up public posts and comments from Facebook and Instagram to train generative AI:
We use public posts and comments on Facebook and Instagram to train generative AI models for these features and for the open source community.
We don’t use posts or comments with an audience other than Public for these purposes.
But the company has been vague about how data is used, when it started scraping, and how far back its collection goes. Asked by The New York Times in June, Meta didn’t answer, other than to confirm that setting posts to anything besides “public” will prevent future scraping. That still won’t delete data that has already been collected — and people posting back in 2007 (who may have been minors at the time) wouldn’t have known their photos and posts would be used in this way.
Claybaugh said that Meta doesn’t scrape data from users who are under the age of 18. When Labor Party senator Tony Sheldon asked if Meta would scrape the public photos of his children on his own account, Claybaugh confirmed it would and was unable to clarify if the company also scraped adult accounts that were created when the user was still a child.
European users can opt out due to local privacy regulations, and Meta was recently banned from using Brazilian personal data for AI training, but the billions of Facebook and Instagram users in other regions can’t opt out if they want to keep their posts public. Claybaugh was unable to say if Australian users (or anyone else) would be given a choice to opt out in the future, arguing that the option was given to European users because of uncertainty regarding its regulatory landscape.
“Meta made it clear today that if Australia had these same laws Australians’ data would also have been protected,” Shoebridge said to ABC News. “The government’s failure to act on privacy means companies like Meta are continuing to monetize and exploit pictures and videos of children on Facebook.”
