Meta is using its users’ public Facebook and Instagram photos and posts to train artificial intelligence and while European users have been allowed to opt out of mass scraping of their content, Australian users do not have that option, a parliamentary committee has heard.
Facebook and Instagram’s parent company suspended the launch of its artificial intelligence product in Europe in July due to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) privacy rules and as a result of the GDPR law. Meta was ordered to stop training its large language model with European user data over privacy concerns, and Meta has given European users an opt-out option.
The chair of the Labor inquiry examining the adoption of artificial intelligence in Australia, Senator Tony Sheldon, asked Meta executives on Tuesday why the option had not been extended to Australian users.
“I’ll be very frank with you. I would like to opt out in Australia… and I would like to have options similar to those in Europe, for all Australians, including for me personally. Why can’t I have that option?”
Melinda Claybaugh, Meta’s director of privacy policy, said posts are only allowed from those who choose to make them public (not just private to people you’ve added as friends) and only from people over 18. But Claybaugh said the opt-out option in Europe was “in response to a very specific legal framework” and did not say whether that option would be offered to Australians in the future.
Greens Senator David Shoebridge said that meant Australians would have had to set posts to private from the start of their Facebook use.
“The truth of the matter is that unless you have consciously set those posts to private, since 2007, Meta has simply decided that it would remove all photos and all text from every public post on Instagram or Facebook that Australians have shared since 2007, unless there has been a conscious decision to set them to private. But that’s the reality, isn’t it?” Shoebridge asked.
“Correct,” Claybaugh replied. He said people could set their posts to private now to prevent them from being tracked in the future. That wouldn’t explain the scraping that has already occurred.
Sheldon said there were millions of Australians using Facebook and Instagram who had not given their consent to have their photos, videos or records of their lives and families used to train an AI model.
“I think people around the world are fed up with tech companies, giants… doing whatever they want, completely ignoring laws and rights as they please, because by taking those things away from people, they feel like they’ve taken away their inherent rights,” she said. “I hope governments do something about it.”