Meta Facebook has admitted in an investigation that it is collecting public information about every adult Australian on the network. Nearly all of the publicly shared content you have uploaded since 2007 has been put into Zuckerberg’s Meta artificial intelligence models.
Due to the lack of legal requirement under Australian privacy laws, the corporation does not provide Australians with the same opt-out choice as it offers for EU consumers.
Meta’s AI was most likely trained on your past Instagram and Facebook posts. As an American, you are unable to opt out.
The Facebook official was unable to respond when asked if the firm collected information from users who were younger than 18 when they registered for an account but were now adults.
Results of Interrogation
Facebook has acknowledged that, despite allowing users in the EU to decline consent, it scrapes the public images, posts, and other data of adult Australian users in order to train its AI models. It also does not offer an opt-out option.
During a local government investigation about the use of AI, Melinda Claybaugh first denied claims that user data from 2007 was being used for AI training. However, she eventually agreed after further interrogation.
Senator David Shoebridge of the Green Party pressed for the investigation
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?
Critics on Reddit
But Reddit users have displayed their criticism of the report and stated that developing artificial intelligence after 2007 will be pointless.
Europeans are allowed the opt-out option; Australians are not
Due in part to the legal confusion around the strict privacy rules that apply in those countries, the company offered customers in the EU the option to opt out.
Ms. Claybaugh acknowledged during the investigation that Australians were not provided with those opt-out choices.
“In Europe there is an ongoing legal question around what is the interpretation of existing privacy law with respect to AI training,”
stated Ms. Claybaugh.
Australian users could set their data to private, according to Ms. Claybaugh, but European users could opt out due to rules that were in effect there.
According to her, Meta need a large amount of data to provide the most “flexible and powerful” AI tool possible, as well as a safer product with fewer biases.
The news was released just one day after the federal government announced that social media use by minors would be prohibited due to potential risks.
“Businesses like Meta are continuing to profit off and exploit images and videos of children on Facebook as a result of the government’s inaction on privacy.”
Meta is exploring partnerships with news publishers to obtain more training data, such as news, photo, and video content, in addition to user-generated information. Numerous news publishers have already entered into agreements with AI rivals like Google and OpenAI for training data.
