Meta’s AI is scraping users’ photos and posts. Europeans can opt out, but Australians cannot

Meta is using the public Facebook and Instagram photos and posts of its users to train artificial intelligence and, while European users have been allowed to opt out of the mass-scraping of their content, Australian users do not have that option, a parliamentary committee has heard.

The parent company of Facebook and Instagram paused the launch of its AI product in Europe in July due to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) privacy rules, and as a result of GDPR law. Meta was ordered to stop training its large language model on data from European users on privacy concerns, and Meta has given European users an opt-out option.

Labor’s chair of the inquiry examining AI adoption in Australia, senator Tony Sheldon, questioned Meta executives on Tuesday why that option had not been extended to Australian users.

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“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?”

Melinda Claybaugh, Meta’s director of privacy policy, said it was only the posts of those who chose to make the post public – not just private to people you have friended – and only for those aged over 18. But Claybaugh said that the opt-out option in Europe was “in response to a very specific legal frame” and would not say whether such an option would be offered to Australians in the future.

The Greens senator David Shoebridge said that meant that Australians would have had to set posts back to the start of their use of Facebook to private.

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“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?” Shoebridge asked.

“Correct,” Claybaugh replied. She said people could set their posts to private now to prevent future scraping. That would not account for the scraping that has already occurred.

Sheldon said there were millions of Australians who used 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.

“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,” he said. “I do expect governments to do something about it.”