Meta acknowledged that all text and images published publicly by adult Facebook and Instagram users since 2007 have been fed into its artificial intelligence models. Australia’s ABC News reports that Meta’s global privacy director, Melinda Claybaugh, initially denied claims about user data from 2007 being used for AI training during an inquiry by local government about AI adoption before giving up after further questioning.
“The fact of the matter is that unless you intentionally set those posts to private since 2007, Meta has decided that you’ll get all the photos and all the text from every public post on Instagram or Facebook since 2007 unless there’s a conscious decision to set them on private,” Green Party senator David Shoebridge pushed back in question. “That’s the truth, isn’t it?”
“Right,” Claybaugh replied.
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 do not use posts or comments in an audience other than Public for these purposes.
But the company isn’t clear about how the data is used, when it starts scraping, and how far back its collection goes. asked by The New York Times in June, Meta did not respond, except to confirm that setting posts to anything other than “public” will prevent scraping in the future. It still won’t delete data that’s already been collected — and people posting in 2007 (who may have been minors then) won’t know their photos and posts will be used in this way.
Claybaugh said Meta does not scrape data from users under 18. When Labor Party senator Tony Sheldon asked if Meta would take public photos of her children on her own account, Claybaugh confirmed it would do so and could not elaborate. if the company also scraps adult accounts created when the user was a child.
“Meta has now made it clear that if Australia has these same laws, Australians’ data will also be protected,” Shoebridge told ABC News. “The government’s failure to act on privacy means that companies like Meta continue to profit from and exploit children’s photos and videos on Facebook.”
