Facebook admits to data scraping Australian accounts, despite previous denials
Facebook uses photos, posts and data from its adult Australian users to train AI models, Meta’s global privacy director, Melinda Claybaugh has admitted.
Unlike in the European Union (EU), Australian law does not currently grant users the right to refuse consent. RMIT Experts are available for comment.
Lisa Given, Professor of Information Sciences
“Initial reports emerged in June that Facebook was using people’s publicly posted data, from as far back as 2007 (e.g. photos and posts), to train its AI tools. Facebook has now admitted this use, publicly.
“Due to requirements of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, Facebook provides an opt-out for EU residents by completing a ‘right to object’ form.
“At the time, both the Irish Data Protection Commission and the UK’s Information Commission asked Meta to provide more time for users to understand their privacy rights, particularly as the system would not automatically prompt users to their right to opt-out.
“Australia does not have similar legislation that would require Facebook to provide an opt-out option for account holders.
“Although this type of data use may be explained and covered in the platform’s terms of service, many people may not realise that Facebook can use their data in this way.
“People may not understand the implications of how these data will be used – i.e. to train large-language models and image generators, based on sentence structures of posts and the relationships between images and captions.
“Australia may need to require similar legislation to the EU’s GDPR in order to protect residents’ data from being used by social media companies in future.”
Dr Dana McKay, Associate Dean, Interaction, Technology and Information
“Facebook may also have breached European law by including photos of Europeans taken by Australians.
“Social media companies have operated on the precedent set by search companies where online information is there for the scraping. There are good historical reasons for search being this way; it basically couldn't exist without it, and data owners were happy to exchange scraping for exposure.
“In this case, Australian people were unaware and it's not clear the scraping has benefited them.
“This is a clear sign we need new privacy laws, although Australia has been pretty good at regulating social media.”
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