Meta Under Investigation for AI Training Data Practices in Australia

Meta in Hot Water: Australia Probes AI Data Use

At a hearing before an Australian parliamentary committee, Melinda Claybaugh, the privacy policy director at Meta, confirmed that the tech giant scrapes content from public profiles without users' explicit consent. All the ways through which Meta collects data, especially from public posts of users aged over 18, have made people skeptical that it will result in violations of privacy. Claybaugh emphasized that while the users can set their posts to private, past public posts may have already been scraped, a sharp reality that didn't go down well with Australian lawmakers. Senator Tony Sheldon, who chairs the AI oversight panel, has expressed frustration with the practices of Meta, "There are millions of Australians who have not consented to using their photos, their videos, or their lives to train an AI model." Comments are truly reflective of a growing sense that it is about time tech companies are held accountable for invasive methods of data collection.

Meta admits it scraped all Australian Facebook posts since 2007 to train its AI

Meta has admitted it used Facebook and Instagram publicposts for Australian users to train its Artificial Intelligence models, and has scraped information from as far back as 2007. An Australian Parliamentary committee has heard that whilst European users can opt out thanks to GDPR laws, Australian customers are not given that choice. Meta has denied using the information of anyone under 18, but did confirm it had used over a decade's worth of data. The firm could not answer whether it has scraped the photos of children who are now adults (i.e. those who created their accounts as a child, but have since turned 18). The process of 'scraping' is essential for the development of AI and is basically data harvesting from websites, extracting the information and feeding it back to a Large Language Models (LLMs) which learns from the data. This means that GDPR regulations are becoming troublesome for more and more LLMs such as ChatGPT, which collects data from all over the internet without consent from the original source. Meta's global privacy director Melinda Claybaugh sat before the inquiry and admitted that the company was forced to pause the launch of AI products in Europe due to a lack of certainty, and it has had to give European users an opt-out due to more robust privacy laws. Senator Shoebridge grilled the Meta representative, "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?" Claybaugh replied, "Correct". She added that users can set their posts to private now to prevent future scraping, but this would have no effect on the data already taken. The realization seems to be creeping in for the public and for tech companies that training AI models requires such vast amounts of data that it is 'impossible' to do so without using copyrighted materials. Considering millions of user's posts have been used without their consent, it looks like tech giants might face much stricter regulations in future.

Meta scraped every Australian user's account to train its AI

In a government inquiry about AI adoption in Australia, Meta's global privacy director Melinda Claybaugh was asked whether her company has been collecting Australians' data to train its generative AI technology. According to ABC News, Claybaugh initially denied the claim, but upon being pressed, she ultimately admitted that Meta scrapes all the photos and texts in all Facebook and Instagram posts from as far back as 2007, unless the user had set their posts to private. Further, she admitted that the company isn't offering Australians an opt-out option like it does to users in the European Union. Claybaugh said that Meta doesn't scrape the accounts of users under 18 years old, but she admitted that the company still collects their photos and other information if they're posted on their parents' or guardians' accounts. She couldn't answer, however, if the company collects data from previous years once a user turns 18. Upon being asked why Meta doesn't offer Australians the option not to consent to data collection, Claybaugh said that it exists in the EU "in response to a very specific legal frame," which most likely pertains to the bloc's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Meta had notified users in the EU that it will collect their data for AI training unless they opt out. "I will say that the ongoing conversation in Europe is the direct result of the existing regulatory landscape," Claybaugh explained during the inquiry. But even in the region, Claybaugh said that there's an "ongoing legal question around what is the interpretation of existing privacy law with respect to AI training." Meta decided not to offer its multimodal AI model and future versions in the block due to what it says is a lack of clarity from European regulators. Most of its concerns centered around the difficulties of training AI models with data from European users while complying with GDPR rules. Despite those legal questions around AI adoption in Europe, bottom line is that Meta is giving users in the bloc the power to block data collection. "Meta made it clear today that if Australia had these same laws Australians' data would also have been protected," Australian Senator David Shoebridge told ABC News. "The government's failure to act on privacy means companies like Meta are continuing to monetise and exploit pictures and videos of children on Facebook."

Meta Scraped Every Australian Adult's Public Photos to Train AI

Meta, the company behind Facebook and Instagram, has admitted to scraping the public photos and text of every Australian adult Facebook or Instagram user dating back nearly 20 years. At an Australian inquiry, Meta's global privacy director, Melinda Claybaugh, was questioned about how Meta leverages user data, including training artificial intelligence (AI) models. Although Claybaugh initially denied that the company had used Australians' data to train generative AI, she eventually relented under continued pressure. "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. That's the reality, isn't it?" asked Greens senator David Shoebridge, as reported by ABC News in Australia. "Correct," Claybaugh responded. Claybaugh clarified that Meta did not scrape the accounts of those under 18 but admitted that they would have been scraped if children were in public photos posted by adult users. Claybaugh was unable to say whether Meta scraped posts by users who were children at the time they signed up but aged up to adulthood at some point during the period content was scraped. In the European Union and the United States, Meta app users were alerted that the company would use their data to train generative AI products unless they opted out. Claybaugh admitted that Australians were not given this same option, citing a difference in the "regulatory landscape." "In Europe there is an ongoing legal question around what is the interpretation of existing privacy law with respect to AI training," Claybaugh said. "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." Senator Shoebrige told ABC that if the government is worried about the potential harm social media can pose to children, the country should focus its legislative efforts on privacy laws. "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. Meta made it clear today that if Australia had these same laws Australians' data would also have been protected," Shoebridge explained. "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," the senator added.

Meta confirms it scrapes Australian users' posts for AI training without opt-out option - SiliconANGLE

Meta confirms it scrapes Australian users' posts for AI training without opt-out option Meta Platforms Inc. is scraping Australian users' Facebook and Instagram posts without providing an opt-out option, the company acknowledged today. Melinda Claybaugh, Meta's global privacy director, detailed the practice during a hearing before the Australian Senate. The executive stated that the company uses the public posts of adult users in Australia to train artificial intelligence models. There is no opt-out option and the only way that users can prevent scraping is by setting a post to private. "We are using public data to train our foundation model and the services we build on that model," Claybaugh told lawmakers. "We are using public data from our product and services." Meta also collects the public data of users in the European Union, but provides them with an opt-out button. Claybaugh said that the feature's availability is a "direct result of the existing regulatory landscape in the EU," which has implemented privacy rules such as GDPR. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported that a similar opt-out setting is not available in Australia. Meta develops a family of open-source large language models called Llama. The newest and most advanced addition to the series, Llama 3.1 405B, was trained using 15 billion tokens of data. That corresponds to several hundred million books' worth of information. Meta trained the model, which it says can outperform GPT-4o across certain benchmarks, through a multistep process. Some of the steps didn't involve information from the public web but rather synthetic data, or data generated by an AI model specifically for neural network training purposes. To support the development of Llama 3.1 405B, Meta created several technical workflows for ensuring that its synthetic data meets quality requirements. The Llama series also includes a number of simpler LLMs with less advanced capabilities. Collectively, the models in the series had about 350 million downloads as of late August, ten times more than the same time a year earlier. In July, Meta revealed that it's working on a multimodal version of Llama. The company stated at the time that it won't make the LLM accessible to developers in the EU because of the "unpredictable nature of the European regulatory environment." The disclosure came a few weeks after the EU passed a landmark piece of legislation designed to regulate certain AI use cases. This week's Australian Senate hearing didn't mark the first time that Meta has drawn scrutiny in the country. In 2021, the Facebook parent blocked Australian users from sharing news articles over a proposed law aimed at requiring social media companies to compensate publishers. Meta reversed the move after lawmakers made amendments to the law, which was passed later that year. This past June, the company raised the possibility that it may once again block news content over the licensing fees it may be required to pay publishers.

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. "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. "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."

Facebook has scraped public data from Australian users without an opt out. What can we do?

University of Technology Sydney provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation AU. Facebook acknowledged in a Senate inquiry yesterday that it is scraping the public photos of Australian users to train its artificial intelligence (AI) models. Facebook's parent company Meta claims this excludes data from users who have marked their posts as "private", as well as photos or data from users under the age of 18. Since companies such as Meta aren't required to tell us what data they use or how they use it, we will have to take their word for it. Even so, users will likely be concerned that Meta is using their data for a purpose they didn't expressly consent to. But there are some steps users can take to improve the privacy of their personal data. Data hungry models AI models are data hungry. They require vast amounts of new data to train on. And the internet provides ready access to data that's relatively easy to ingest in a process that doesn't distinguish between copyrighted works or personal data. Many people are concerned about the possible consequences of this wide-scale, obscure ingestion of our information and creativity. Media companies have taken AI companies such as OpenAI to court for training models on their news stories. Artists who use social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram to advertise their work are also concerned their work is being used without permission, compensation or credit. Others are worried about the chance AI could present them in ways that are inaccurate and misleading. A local mayor in Victoria considered legal action against ChatGPT after the program falsely claimed he was a guilty party in a foreign bribery scandal. Generative AI models have no capacity to ascertain the truth of the statements or images they produce, and we still don't know what harms will come from our growing reliance on AI tools. People in other countries are better protected In some countries, legislation supports ordinary users from having their data ingested by AI companies. Meta was recently ordered to stop training its large language model on data from European users and has given those users an opt-out option. In the European Union, personal data is protected under the General Data Protection Regulation. This law prohibits the use of personal data for undefined "artificial intelligence technology" without opt-in consent. Australians don't have the same option under existing privacy laws. The recent inquiry has strengthened calls to update them to better protect users. A major privacy act reform was also announced today that's been several years in the making. Three key actions There are three key actions Australians can take to better protect their personal data from companies such as Facebook in the absence of targeted legislation. First, Facebook users can ensure their data is marked as "private". This would prevent any future scraping (although it won't account for the scraping that has already occurred or any scraping we may not know about.) Second, we can experiment with new approaches to consent in the age of AI. For example, tech startup Spawning is experimenting with new methods for consent to "benefit both AI development and the people it is trained on". Their latest project, Source.Plus, is intended to curate "non-infringing" media for training AI models from public domain images and images under a Creative Commons CC0 "no rights reserved" license. Third, we can lobby our government to pressure AI companies to ask for consent when they scrape our data and ensure that researchers and public agencies can audit AI companies for compliance. We need a broader conversation about what rights the public should have to resist technology corporations using our data. This conversation also needs to include an alternative approach to building AI - one that is grounded in obtaining consent and respecting peoples' privacy.

Meta scraped all public Facebook and Instagram posts since 2007

While the admission was made during a public enquiry in Australia, the company's statement applies globally ... The company has previously admitted to plans to use posts and photos to train its AI systems, but has not before agreed that it has already been doing so for a great many years. Back in June, CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed plans to do this, as if it were a new initiative. The announcement has raised major concerns, after he said that the company had more user data than was used to train ChatGPT - and would soon be using it to train its own AI systems. The company's plan to use Facebook and Instagram posts and comments to train a competing chatbot raises concerns about both privacy and toxicity. The company was legally required to offer opt-outs in both the EU and UK, though even there the legality of making it opt-out rather than opt-in is under investigation. No such opt-out was offered in the US, Australia, or anywhere else. An Australian investigation into Meta's privacy practices has resulted in the company's admission that it has been scraping public posts, photos, and comments from both Facebook and Instagram for the past 17 years. Meta's global privacy director Melinda Claybaugh initially denied it. Labor senator Tony Sheldon asked whether Meta had used Australian posts from as far back as 2007 to feed its AI products, to which Ms Claybaugh responded "we have not done that". But when specifically pressed, she then admitted it was true for public posts. Shoebridge: "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. That's the reality, isn't it? Claybaugh: "Correct." Meta didn't scrape the accounts of those aged under 18, but agreed that it included photos of children posted by parents on their own accounts.