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Meta has drawn ire from regulators in Australia over its usage of public posts on Facebook and Instagram to train its AI model. Appearing before an Australian parliamentary committee, Melinda Claybaugh, Meta’s privacy policy director, admitted that the tech giant scrapes photos and posts made public by users aged over 18 without obtaining their consent.
Claybaugh said that users’ posts that have been set to private can prevent future scraping, but that may not make much of a difference if the content has already been scraped.
There are millions of Australians who use Facebook and Instagram who have not consented to using their photos, their videos, or the record of their lives and families to train an AI model, said Australian Senator Tony Sheldon, who serves as the chair of the panel tasked with overseeing AI adoption in the country.
“I do think the people around the world are sick of tech companies, giants…doing whatever they want, completely ignoring laws and rights as they go because having those things taken off people, they feel as if their inherent right has been taken off them,” Sheldon was quoted as saying by The Guardian.
Currently, only users in the European Union have been given a choice to opt-out of the data scraping process. EU regulators had ordered Meta to stop training its large language model on European user data, citing privacy concerns.
Demanding the same exemption from Meta in Australia, Senator David Shoebridge said, “I’ll be very frank with you. I’d like to opt out in Australia … and I’d like to have the options similar to Europe, for all Australians, including for myself personally. Why can’t I have that option?”
Shoebridge also argued that Meta’s justification of only scraping public posts meant that users would have to go back and set all their Facebook or Instagram posts to private.
“The truth of the matter is that, unless you consciously had set those posts to private, since 2007, Meta has just decided you will scrape all of the photos and all of the text from every public post on Instagram or Facebook that Australians have shared since 2007, unless there was a conscious decision to set them on private. But that’s actually the reality, isn’t it?” he was quoted as saying.
Privacy concerns regarding Meta’s training of AI models using publicly available data have also been raised in India. The Software Freedom Law Centre, a Delhi-based digital rights advocacy group, penned a letter to the Union Ministry of Information and Technology stating, “It is important to ensure that the possibility of harm arising to Indian users is minimised with the automated processing of personal and non-personal data by Meta AI.”
“Presently, the process to opt-out is long-winded and obfuscating. Users must have the autonomy to restrict the processing of their data by automated systems through simple and clear processes,” the letter read.
