Meta Scraping Public Posts for Use in AI Models

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If you’ve posted publicly on Facebook or Instagram at any time since 2007, your data may be scraped by parent company Meta to use in its artificial intelligence models, Meta global privacy director Melinda Claybaugh acknowledged during a hearing in Australia this week.

Claybaugh initially rejected the claims that the data was leveraged for AI training, reports Australia’s ABC News.

“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,” Australian Green Party Sen. David Shoebridge asked her during the hearing. “That’s the reality, isn’t it?”

“Correct,” she replied.

Meta’s privacy center acknowledges that its companies scoop up posts and comments from its companies to train generative AI but said it only uses the posts made publicly, not those with privacy settings.

In June, The New York Times reported on Meta’s practices, and the company only confirmed that setting posts to anything but public will prevent the company from scraping data for its AI models.

But even switching posts to private now won’t delete data the company has already collected, if those posts were made publicly, reports The Verge.

Claybaugh confirmed that Meta does not scrape data from users under the age of 18, but could not clarify if the company scraped accounts from adults who created their pages while still being children.

Meanwhile, as privacy rules differ by country and region, users in the United States have no real way to stop the Meta AI generator from learning from their public social media posts, as the country has no privacy laws governing the activity, reports The New York Times.

“While we don’t currently have an opt-out feature, we’ve built in-platform tools that allow people to delete their personal information from chats with Meta A.I. across our apps,” Meta said in a statement.

The company, however, said that those using Meta apps in the European Union, Britain, the European Economic Area, and Switzerland were notified that they could opt out of the process.

According to Facebook’s legal terms, that company says that “if you share a photo on Facebook, you give us permission to store, copy, and share it with others.”

Depending on how a customer uses the company’s settings, their posts can be used in other Meta products as well, including Instagram and WhatsApp.