Meta Under Fire for Using Australian User Accounts in AI Training

Meta’s global privacy director said that the company scrapes public Facebook and Instagram posts from Australians to train AI. However, Australians don’t have the option to opt out that EU users do because their privacy laws are different.

Meta’s global privacy director, Melinda Claybaugh, was asked by the government about whether her company has been collecting data on Australians to train its generative AI technology.

This was part of an investigation into AI use in Australia. ABC News says Claybaugh at first denied the claim, but when pushed, she finally said that Meta does indeed scrape all the photos and text in all Facebook and Instagram posts from as early as 2007, unless the user has made their posts private. She also said the company doesn’t give Australians the same opt-out option as EU users.

Claybaugh said that Meta doesn’t sneak into the accounts of people younger than 18, but she did say that the company does get their photos and other information if they’re on their parents’ or guardians’ accounts.

That being said, she couldn’t say if the company keeps old data on users after they turn 18. A person asked Claybaugh why Meta doesn’t give Australians the choice not to allow data collection. He replied that Meta does this in the EU “in response to a very specific legal frame,” which most likely refers to the GDPR.

Meta told users in the EU that unless they choose not to, it will use their data to train AI. During the hearing, Claybaugh said, “I will say that the ongoing conversation in Europe is a direct result of the current regulatory landscape.”

Meta Faces Ongoing Privacy Challenges

But Claybaugh said that there is still an “ongoing legal question” in the area about how to interpret current privacy laws when it comes to AI training. Meta didn’t put its multimodal AI model or any future versions of it in the block because European regulators weren’t clear.

It was mostly worried about how challenging it would be to train AI models with data from European users while still following GDPR rules.

Although the use of AI in Europe has raised legal issues, Meta is still allowing users in the bloc to stop data collection.

Meta made it clear today that Australians’ data would have been safe if we had the same laws,” David Shoebridge, an Australian senator, told ABC News. “The government’s failure to act on privacy means companies like Meta continue to monetize and exploit pictures and videos of children on Facebook.”