ABC News: “Facebook admits to scraping every Australian adult user’s public photos and posts to train AI, with no opt-out option”

But that was quickly challenged by Greens senator David Shoebridge.

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.

Ms Claybaugh added that accounts of people under 18 were not scraped, but when asked by Senator Sheldon whether public photos of his own children on his account would be scraped, Ms Claybaugh acknowledged they would.

Jake Evans

Hardly surprising coming from Facebook – or any other American tech giant for that matter; the latest example being LinkedIn, which has covertly opted its users in to supply data for AI training without even bothering to update their terms of service.

This is why GDPR is so important in the EU, and why, despite all its critics and lackluster enforcement, the core of the legislation is sound and future proof. In simple terms, companies need to have legitimate reason, or consent, to use consumers’ data for new purposes. Training AI models is clearly a new purpose that doesn’t precisely have a legitimate reason, so companies should in theory ask for distinct consent before using the data.

Meta’s global privacy policy director Melinda Claybaugh spoke to a senate inquiry on adopting AI. ABC News: Adam Kennedy

Ms Claybaugh admitted to the inquiry that those opt-out options were not offered to Australians.

In Europe there is an ongoing legal question around what is the interpretation of existing privacy law with respect to AI training, Ms 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.

Ms Claybaugh said Australian users had the ability to set data to private, but opt-out options offered to Europeans were in response to laws in force there.

Obviously, companies really do not want to consult individual users on this issue, because the entire premise of current AI models relies on the assumption of massive, unrestricted input data without compensation for the original authors. This is why you get these twisted, disingenuous narratives from their PR people about ‘lack of clarity’ of EU legislation, or veiled threats and fearmongering that the EU – and the UK as well – will get ‘left behind’ in the AI race if they don’t relax legal protections around copyrighted materials and fund the expansion of their data centers. Unclear how you can get ‘left behind’ on a technology that remains incredibly expensive, yet unreliable and prone to wild fabrications, with questionable results in a business environment. This seems like the ideal situation to be a late adopter, after (if) these massive issues will be remediated.