Your post may have been crawled by Meta for artificial intelligence model development

[New Sancai Compilation First Release] Melinda Claybaugh, Meta's global privacy director, admitted at a hearing in Australia this week that if you post publicly on Facebook or Instagram at any time since 2007 Article, your information may be crawled by the parent company Meta for use in its artificial intelligence model development.

According to ABC News, Klebaugh initially denied the idea that the data was used for artificial intelligence training.

"The truth of the matter is that unless you intentionally made those posts private since 2007, Meta has just decided to scrape every photo and text content (for their artificial intelligence training). Unless you make a conscious decision to make them private," Australian Greens Senator David Shoebridge asked at the hearing. "That's the truth, isn't it?"

"Correct," Claybaugh answered.

Meta's Privacy Center acknowledged that the company collects its company's posts and comments to train its artificial intelligence, but said it only uses publicly posted posts, not those with privacy settings.

In June 2024, the New York Times reported on Meta's practices, saying that the company had only confirmed that setting posts as private would prevent the company from scraping data for its artificial intelligence models.

But according to The Verge, even turning posts private now won't delete the data the company has already collected if they were posted publicly.

Klebaugh confirmed that Meta does not scrape the data of users under 18, but could not clarify whether the company scraped the accounts of adults who created pages as children.

Meanwhile, as privacy rules vary by country and region, U.S. users have no real way to prevent Meta AI generators from learning from their public social media posts, as the country has no privacy laws governing that activity, according to a New York Times report.

"While we do not currently have an opt-out feature, we have built in-platform tools to allow people to remove personal information from chats with Meta AI within our apps," Meta said in a statement.

However, the company said people using the Meta app in the EU, UK, European Economic Area and Switzerland will be notified and can opt out of the program.

According to Facebook's legal terms, the company says "if you share a photo on Facebook, you give us permission to store, copy and share that photo with others."

Depending on how customers use the company's settings, their posts can also be used in other Meta products, including Instagram and WhatsApp.

(Compiled by: Wang Jimin)

(Editor: Jiang Qiming)

(Source of the article: Compiled and published by New Sancai)