Meta's AI is scraping users' photos and posts. Europeans can opt out ...
Meta is using the public Facebook and Instagram photos and posts of its users to train artificial intelligence. While European users have the option to opt out of this mass-scraping of their content, Australian users do not have the same privilege, as revealed by a parliamentary committee.
European Opt-Out
The parent company of Facebook and Instagram had to pause the launch of its AI product in Europe back in July due to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) privacy rules. Meta was required to cease training its large language model on data from European users due to privacy concerns. Consequently, Meta has provided European users with the option to opt out of this data collection.
Concerns for Australian Users
Labor’s chair of the inquiry examining AI adoption in Australia, senator Tony Sheldon, raised questions as to why Australian users were not granted a similar opt-out option like their European counterparts. Melinda Claybaugh, Meta’s director of privacy policy, mentioned that only public posts from users aged over 18 were being utilized for AI training purposes.
Australian Users' Dilemma
Greens senator David Shoebridge highlighted that Australian users would have to manually set their posts back to private dating all the way to 2007 on both Facebook and Instagram to prevent their content from being scraped by Meta for AI training.
Shoebridge pointed out that Meta's decision to scrape all public posts on Instagram and Facebook shared by Australians since 2007 without explicit consent could be concerning. Claybaugh confirmed this reality and suggested users set their future posts to private to avoid further scraping, although this wouldn't address the data already collected.
Government Intervention
Senator Sheldon emphasized the need for government intervention, stating that tech companies like Meta should not disregard laws and user rights. Millions of Australians who use Facebook and Instagram may not have consented to their data being used for AI training purposes, raising significant privacy concerns.
In conclusion, the debate over Meta's data scraping practices highlights the importance of user privacy and the necessity for regulations to hold tech giants accountable for their actions.
