Meta’s global privacy policy director Melinda Claybaugh has admitted that Meta has been collecting data from public photos and posts from Facebook and Instagram and feeding it into its AI training models since 2007.
In the sixth public hearing from the Select Committee on Adopting Artificial Intelligence (AI) of the Australian Senate, the Meta executive said the company has not scraped any information from people under 18, but that photos of children posted on adult's accounts could have been used to train its AI systems.
The parliamentary committee also heard that those in Europe can opt out of the mass data collection but Australians cannot.
“In Europe there is an ongoing legal question around what is the interpretation of existing privacy law with respect to AI training,” Claybaugh said.
“We have paused launching our AI products in Europe while there is a lack of certainty, so you are correct that we are offering an opt-out to users in Europe."
Claybaugh said Australian users could set their data to private but added that Meta requires an extensive amount of data to develop the most "flexible and powerful" AI tools possible.
The parliamentary inquiry was established in March and is next week due to report on the opportunities and impacts for Australia arising out of the uptake of AI technologies.
Public hearings have heard calls for restrictions to be issued for the use of AI tools in fields such as healthcare, media and art.
The firms responsible for AI tools including Google's Gemini, Amazon Lex and Microsoft's Copilot, have also faced questions about how businesses might implement the technology and how it can be misused.
Meta's Claybaugh said AI has been fundamental to Meta’s technology and user experience on its platforms since Facebook's news feed was introduced in 2006.
“Today we’re continuing to leverage our expertise in AI and our robust governance structure to build cutting edge generative AI models and systems,” Claybaugh said.
“We're doing so in part by embracing our long held company tradition of open sourcing our foundational AI technology.”
Earlier this year, Meta released an AI assistant together with their open large language model Llama, which can provide recommendations, offer how-to advice, help with writing, create images and answer questions.
This comes less than a week after attorney-general Mark Dreyfus announced that an overhaul of the Privacy Act is on track to be introduced to the federal parliament this month.
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