https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-09-11/facebook-scraping-photos-data-no-opt-out/104336170

Facebook admits to scraping every Australian adult user's public photos and posts to train AI, with no opt-out option

In short:

Facebook is scraping the public data of all Australian adults on the platform, it has acknowledged in an inquiry.

The company does not offer Australians an opt out option like it does in the EU, because it has not been required to do so under privacy law.

Facebook has admitted that it scrapes the public photos, posts and other data of Australian adult users to train its AI models and provides no opt-out option, even though it allows people in the European Union to refuse consent.

Meta's global privacy director Melinda Claybaugh was pressed at an inquiry as to whether the social media giant was hoovering up the data of all Australians in order to build its generative artificial intelligence tools, and initially rejected that claim.

Labor senator Tony Sheldon asked whether Meta had used Australian posts from as far back as 2007 to feed its AI products, to which Ms Claybaugh responded "we have not done that".

But that was quickly challenged by Greens senator David Shoebridge.

Shoebridge: "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: "Correct."

Ms Claybaugh added that accounts of people under 18 were not scraped, but when asked by Senator Sheldon whether public photos of his own children on his account would be scraped, Ms Claybaugh acknowledged they would.

The Facebook representative could not answer whether the company scraped data from previous years of users who were now adults, but were under 18 when they created their accounts.

In June, Meta notified users in the European Union and United States that it would use their data to train its generative AI products, such as Meta AI, unless users opted out.