Meta has confirmed that Facebook trains its AI using posts from Australian users with no method of opting out, at a recent senate inquiry.
As reported by ABC News, Melinda Claybaugh, Meta’s privacy policy director, appeared at a recent hearing regarding Australia’s uptake of AI technologies. She confirmed that posts on Facebook dating as far back as 2007 have been scraped as part of Meta’s datasets used to train AI models.
Meta recently rolled out an AI chatbot across its apps, including Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp. It’s based on the company’s Llama AI model, one of the largest of its kind.
Claybaugh reiterated that Meta did not scrape data from Facebook users under 18. However, photos of children posted to adults’ accounts were scraped.
Notably, Meta does not currently offer Australian users the ability to opt out of AI training. Users in the European Union, however, had an opt-out choice, as announced in June, due to the region’s privacy laws.
Greens Senator David Shoebridge told ABC News this reflected the Australian government’s inaction on privacy laws.
“There’s a reason that people’s privacy is protected in Europe and not in Australia, it’s because European lawmakers made tough privacy laws,” Senator Shoebridge said. “Meta made it clear today that if Australia had these same laws Australians’ data would also have been protected.”
“The government’s failure to act on privacy means companies like Meta are continuing to monetise and exploit pictures and videos of children on Facebook.”
Earlier in the week, the Federal Government announced plans to legislate an age requirement for social media use. It’s sparked widespread discussion including concerns over the potential harms an age limit could raise.
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