Meta ‘admits scraping public data of Australians,’ without any option to opt-out

Facebook is reportedly scraping the public data of all Australian adults on the platform, it has admitted in an inquiry. Currently, Meta does not provide an opt-out option for Australians as it does for EU citizens, since Australian privacy laws do not require it.

Local media, ABC News, reported that Melinda Claybaugh, Meta’s global privacy director, was questioned about whether her company has been using data from Australians to train its generative AI technology. After being pressed on the matter, Claybaugh acknowledged that the tech giant 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.

Greens senator David Shoebridge challenged Claybaugh, stating: “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?”

She responded by saying that he was “correct,” but added that accounts of people under 18 were not scraped. However, Labor Senator Tony Sheldon inquired if public photos of his children on his account would be scraped, to which she confirmed they would.

A Meta spokesperson told ReadWrite: “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 AI across our apps. Depending on where people live, they can also object to the use of their personal information being used to build and train AI consistent with local privacy laws.”

In January, Meta announced it would allow EU users of its Instagram, Facebook, and Messenger apps to unlink their accounts due to an upcoming change in legislation. The Digital Markets Act (DMA) forces the world’s biggest social media provider to comply with the new rules, allowing people to use Meta’s platforms without their information being shared.

Consequently, Claybaugh said Australian users would be able to set their data to private, but Meta’s opt-out options would only be offered to Europeans as a response to the DMA legislation.

However, in June, it was revealed that Meta was using Instagram and Facebook content for AI training, automatically opting in all users, including those located in the EU and the United States. The company stated: “Even if you don’t use our Products and services or have an account, we may still process information about you to develop and improve AI at Meta.”

That means that, even if you don’t have a Facebook or Instagram profile, if someone else shares your image or information about you there, it will still be used to train Meta’s AI systems.

There is a way to opt out of the service. If you have received a notification about AI training on your Facebook profile, click through on the notification and then on ‘right to object’. Otherwise, you can also click directly through via this link.

From there, you need to fill out your country of residence, email, and the reason you don’t want Meta using your information for AI training. This can be as simple as writing: ‘I don’t want my data used.’

Once sent off, you should get a response from Meta confirming that the content you post won’t be used to train AI. That said, this still doesn’t include when you appear anywhere in an image shared on Meta’s services by someone else or when you are mentioned in posts or captions that someone else shares.

Featured image: Ideogram

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