Facebook used Australian user’s information to train AI, without an opt-out
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). A turning tide
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.
