Mark Zuckerberg's Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has admitted to scraping public data Australian adults have posted since 2007 to train its artificial intelligence (AI) models.
Meta Global Privacy Director Melinda Claybaugh made this admission during an inquiry by the Australian Senate, where lawmakers pressed her on the matter. The senators sought to find out whether the Big Tech company was scooping up the data of all Australians for its generative AI tools.
Claybaugh initially rejected the claim in response to New South Wales (NSW) Sen. Tony Sheldon of the Australian Labor Party, telling him: "We have not done that." But NSW Sen. David Shoebridge of the Australian Greens quickly challenged the claim.
"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," said Shoebridge. "That's the reality, isn't it?"
"Correct," said Claybaugh, adding that accounts of people under 18 were not scraped. But a follow-up question by Sheldon as to whether the company scraped data from previous years of users who were now adults, but were under 18 when they created their accounts, yielded no response.
According to the Meta executive, the company needed a lot of data in order to provide the most "flexible and powerful" AI tool it could. This huge data set was also required to deliver a safer product with fewer biases. (Related: Meta abandons free speech principles, adopts globalist thought police guidelines to block speech.)
Even the company's own privacy center and blog posts have acknowledged using public posts and comments from Facebook and Instagram to train its generative AI. However, Meta has been vague about how data is used, when it started scraping, and how far back its collection goes. The tech giant didn't answer questions by the New York Times in June on the matter, save for confirming that setting posts to anything other than "public" will prevent future scraping.
Claybaugh: No opt-out option available for Aussies
During the inquiry, Claybaugh admitted that opt-out options available to users in the European Union and the U.S. are absent for Australians. She added that Australian users had the ability to set data to private.
In June, Meta notified users in the EU and the U.S. that it would use their data to train its generative AI products unless they opted out. Such opt-out choices, the Meta executive added, were provided to EU users in part because of legal uncertainty surrounding strict privacy laws covering those nations.
"In Europe there is an ongoing legal question around what is the interpretation of existing privacy law with respect to AI training. We have paused launching our AI products in Europe while there is a lack of certainty. So you are correct that we are offering an opt-out to users in Europe. I will say that the ongoing conversation in Europe is the direct result of the existing regulatory landscape." Claybaugh told lawmakers.
The revelation by Claybaugh follows Canberra vowing to introduce a ban on social media for children, over concerns of harm the platforms were causing. Shoebridge told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that if the government is concerned about online harms young people face, sorting out privacy laws should be a key priority.
"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," he said.
"Meta made it clear today that if Australia had these same laws Australians' data would also have been protected," he said. "The government’s failure to act on privacy means companies like Meta are continuing to monetize and exploit pictures and videos of children on Facebook."
Watch this video about the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency creating Facebook as a tool to spy and monitor.
This video is from the Preacher channel on Brighteon.com.
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