Meta Admits To Using Public Posts, Photos Of Australians For AI Training Since 2007

Meta has been using public photos, posts and other data of millions of Australian adult users from Facebook and Instagram to train its artificial intelligence models since 2007, the tech giant's director of privacy policy, Melinda Claybaugh, told a parliamentary inquiry.

Appearing before the senate select committee on adopting artificial intelligence, Claybaugh and Meta vice president public policy for APAC, Simon Milner, confirmed collecting data unless the user had marked the post as private, News.com reported.

Initially, she denied that Meta was scraping data; however, she admitted later after being confronted by Labor Senator Tony Sheldon.

While Europeans had the option to refuse to give consent to their data being used under privacy laws, Meta had not extended the option to Australians, she conceded.

In July this year, Meta halted the launch of AI models in Europe after it was ordered to stop using data of European users under General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) privacy rules, and allowed Europeans the choice to opt out, The Guardian reported.

Claybaugh said posts that were public since 2007 were used for the same, and added that people could make their posts private now to avoid it, though it would not address what had already been retrieved.

According to Claybaugh, Meta required data to build a "flexible and powerful" AI tool with few biases, reported ABC News.

Greens senator David Shoebridge said people have grown tired of tech companies violating their privacy and rights and that he expected the government to intervene. He pointed out that the government should focus on implementing privacy laws to counter online harm against children and young adults.

"There's a reason that people's privacy is protected in Europe and not in Australia, it'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," he said. "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."

Claybaugh admitted it was unlikely that users read Meta's policy statement, which was 25,000 words long.

In recent months, Australia has seen a rise in negative impacts on children using social media, prompting the federal government to consider a trial ban on children accessing the platforms.