Facebook has admitted that it scrapes the public photos, posts and other data of Australian adult users to train its AI models and provides no opt-out option, even though it allows people in the European Union to refuse consent.

In short:

Facebook is scraping the public data of all Australian adults on the platform, it has acknowledged in an inquiry.

The company does not offer Australians an opt out option like it does in the EU, because it has not been required to do so under privacy law.

What’s next?

Facebook representatives could not say whether an opt-out option would be offered to Australians in the future.

  • dutchkimble@lemy.lolEnglish
    2·
    2 months ago

    It does say public, but I guess it’s a confusing article. In any case, I’m all for privacy and not defending social media at all, just that if someone else chooses to not be private then they shouldn’t be unhappy if it’s actually not private is what I meant.

    • BassTurd@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      2 months ago

      You’re right, I had misremembered the phrasing. I just hate that the current state of affairs is everything you put online is going into model training. I feel everything should be opt in. If a company wants to profit off of my stuff, they should have to ask, even if it’s hosted there, especially since when these social media sites first came about, the idea of training data models with user information wasn’t a thing.

      I’d begrudgingly accept a cutoff where anything prior to a date where terms were explicitly set to include language for data modeling was excluded. It’s really dumb that the advent of new technologies just allows companies to profit of anyone’s creations with permission.