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AI Facebook Australia Privacy

Facebook Admits To Scraping Every Australian Adult User's Public Photos and Posts To Train AI, With No Opt-out Option (abc.net.au) 56

Posted by msmash from the creepy-inc dept.
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. From a report: Meta's global privacy director Melinda Claybaugh was pressed at an inquiry as to whether the social media giant was hoovering up the data of all Australians in order to build its generative artificial intelligence tools, and initially rejected that claim. Labor senator Tony Sheldon asked whether Meta had used Australian posts from as far back as 2007 to feed its AI products, to which Ms Claybaugh responded "we have not done that".

But that was quickly challenged by Greens senator David Shoebridge.

Shoebridge: "The truth of the matter is that unless you have consciously set those posts to private since 2007, Meta has just decided that you will scrape all of the photos and all of the texts from every public post on Instagram or Facebook since 2007, unless there was a conscious decision to set them on private. That's the reality, isn't it?
Claybaugh: "Correct."

Ms Claybaugh added that accounts of people under 18 were not scraped, but when asked by Senator Sheldon whether public photos of his own children on his account would be scraped, Ms Claybaugh acknowledged they would.

Facebook Admits To Scraping Every Australian Adult User's Public Photos and Posts To Train AI, With No Opt-out Option More | Reply

Facebook Admits To Scraping Every Australian Adult User's Public Photos and Posts To Train AI, With No Opt-out Option

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  • To the complete surprise of nobody (Score:5, Informative)

    by Hadlock ( 143607 ) on Wednesday September 11, 2024 @03:22PM (#64781041) Homepage Journal

    If the product is free, You Are The Product

    • I take it that they already admitted scrapping every public picture of US citizens?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Hadlock ( 143607 )

        They've scraped absolutely everything. Why wouldn't they? They exist to make a profit, it's in their legal charter as an entity.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by guruevi ( 827432 )

        Note that it is public, you should not expect privacy on the things you intentionally make things public.

        ANYONE can go and scrape ANY website and use it for their internal purposes, that is the entire reason people put things to the Internet, so other people can see it.

    • So they built an AI that is partisan, emotional, and complete garbage

      • So it's like people?

        • Well J.D. and Elon do want to breed us like cattle.

          Det. Thorn: The ocean's dying. Plankton's dying. It's people. Soylent Green is made out of people. They're making our food out of people. Next thing, they'll be breeding us like cattle for food. You've gotta tell them. You've gotta tell them!

        • More like the caricature people show on social media. At best, a cartoon of reality.

    • Not quite "nobody." Politicians seem to be often surprised by the bad behavior of Facebook in particular, and Big Tech in general.

      Should we presume that politicians are particularly gullible? Or is there another explanation? ;-)

    • If the product is free, You Are The Product

      I look forward to my free Ford car. Surely they wouldn't cost 100K and have me be the product anyways, right?

      https://thebronconation.com/ge... [thebronconation.com]

    • Dumb take. This has nothing to do with free or not free, it has to do with private or public. If I post a something publicly - e.g. this post here, I cease having any control over who can see it. The only remaining factor becomes copyright, and copyright law currently does not recognise a right for a computer not to look at your data.

    • "They 'trust me'. Dumb fucks." - Mark Zuckerberg

  • They've scraped (Score:5, Insightful)

    by hdyoung ( 5182939 ) on Wednesday September 11, 2024 @03:28PM (#64781067)
    everything. everything. Full stop. No further discussion. Everything means e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g. They've scraped literally every speck of usable data that they can harvest. Laws bent or outright ignored, every TOS ignored. National borders meaningless. If some court fines them, they'll put lawyers on the case, delay and appeal for the next 25 years, and then shrug their shoulders and pay the fine, which will probably get whittled down to the 10s-of-millions-range, which is literal pocket change to them.

    Every other internet company that's selling ads or trying to develop LLMs has done exactly the same thing. Get a mad as you want. It's not going to change.
    • Facebook has been called multiple times tracking you on a device even if you never logged into Facebook up to and including listening to the speaker on your phone. These days when I get a new phone the first thing I do is uninstall Facebook and Twitter too.

    • And quite a bit of completely worthless data, which is why Meta AI is a hallucinatory, self-contradicting mess

      • And quite a bit of completely worthless data, which is why Meta AI is a hallucinatory, self-contradicting mess

        Imagine a human trained on nothing but Facebook and Instagram content. Can you picture what a dim-witted, drooling mess that person would be? I can't imagine anyone thinks that data scraping would lead to an intelligent AI. Though I'm betting it's pretty good at slinging insults if all the guardrails are taken down.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Hadlock ( 143607 )

      You could just replace the post with this comment and turn off comments, done in one

  • It should be "With no OPT-IN option"... Opt-Out is the thief's choice. No good reason for Opt-Out to be default.

    • In the EU/UK use of personal data requires consent and consent requires a positive opt-in. [ico.org.uk]. So Facebook is breaking the GDPR. However it will take forever for the authorities to bother to do anything about this.

    • If data is public, it's public. Anyone can and should be able to scrape it if they desire. Don't want it used? Make it friends only.

      It's just like in public spots, anyone can pull out a camera and record you in that public spot and there is nothing you can do about it.

      As for the EU, they are paranoid. Training this data does nothing to harm you as long as the data is properly sanitized (IE: names, addresses, and other PII filtered out).
      • like I can trust the corporations to do any of that? Nobody should be able to take my images and make money off of them, especially stuff that has been online for years before any of this 'virtuous scraping' came around. You wanna be able to take it? Then you don't get to make any money from it ....

  • The asshole's motto (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anachronous Coward ( 6177134 ) on Wednesday September 11, 2024 @03:38PM (#64781103)

    Better to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission.

    • Actually, it's "Better to do as I please, and force everyone else to clean up after the problems I cause, while also calling them variant of stupid."
  • facebook is evil? say it isn't so!
  • The basic rule, if you want something to be private do not put it on the internet. At the very least, do not put it on a site to which you do not control access. If you want something to be private, keep it private. If we have not learned that by now, we are really slow learners.

    • ... to which you do not control access.

      It's good advice but not that easy when the internet is used for shopping and social media.

      That includes 1) every shop that holds evidence (a copy of your Id.) that you are a real person, 2) every personal e-device that forcibly copies your emails and photos to a cloud account (that technically, is under your control). Those are the target of most cyber-attacks. Facebook is a little different in that a) people volunteer somewhat private information, b) they don't publish a copy of their Id. on their pag

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by guruevi ( 827432 )

        None of that stuff is public, we are talking about public content here which Facebook scraped. Just like Google scraped it and Altavista scraped it.

        If you have a broker that puts your information that should be private in a public sphere, then that is the problem of the broker.

        • Actually, if you upload stuff to Meta, it's their server. What did you expect? It's not a public square. It's literally a privately run server by a corporation.

          Also, you don't need to be on social media. That's a choice you make.

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by guruevi ( 827432 )

            I agree you don't need to be on social media, I'm just saying that people uploading wanted their stuff public, it can then be scraped or used however people want to, that was the entire intent of the Internet. Just because you're scared of a langchain doesn't mean you didn't put your stuff in public. If you put it on Meta server, you want your friends, family and the world to see it...

    • It's out of your control. You also have to convince your idiot friends not to post photos they took of you. Simple, just convince all your idiot friends not to write about you and upload pictures of you, and the assorted cameras and doorbells too. (I do this the traditional Slashdot way).

      The other alternative is evil, unAmerican regulations to protect your privacy.

      • Also, don't go out in public without a mask on. You can't be to careful and anyone can photo you in public, regardless of your opinion.

  • "Privacy Rapist Admits To Scraping Every Australian Adult User's Public Photos and Posts"

    There FTFY.

  • You can tell people until you're blue in the face. "But why?" They ask as if they shouldn't know better by now. "I don't have anything to hide" they say when told FB collects their data. They deserve Facebook. Let them eat "I don't have anything to hide" glory.

  • some things never change (Score:3)

    by awwshit ( 6214476 ) on Wednesday September 11, 2024 @04:25PM (#64781291)

    Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard

    Zuck: Just ask.

    Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS

    [Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?

    Zuck: People just submitted it.

    Zuck: I don't know why.

    Zuck: They "trust me"

    Zuck: Dumb fucks

  • Hell, fuck all so-called 'social media'. Beyond a very early stage of the game, it all became cancerous nonsense that takes everyone who participates in it for a fool, and overall anymore is just a tool for spreading lies and misinformation.
    EIther clean all of it up, or get rid of all of it.

  • This isn't scraping. Scraping is using some automated tool to grab resources from services that don't explicitly provide access or an interface to those resources.

    This is FB using the data that people voluntarily uploaded to their own systems, and I bet the TOS the person agreed to allows FB to use the data in this manner.

    Now if you or I wrote a bot to crawl FB's website and capture profile pictures... that would be "scraping".

  • Almost certainly every major imagegen except Adobe's intentionally has public images from Facebook in their training set (a few will slip through for Adobe).

  • The ability to set your privacy scope does act as an Opt-Out, and anyone serious would be set to private, so how doesn't that qualify?

  • Australian here (Score:4, Funny)

    by ChunderDownunder ( 709234 ) on Wednesday September 11, 2024 @05:19PM (#64781447)

    All those flabby unattractive dad-bods you see in generated AI; you're welcome ladies.

  • TOS. The mighty TOS. (Score:3)

    by mmell ( 832646 ) on Wednesday September 11, 2024 @05:26PM (#64781461)
    Late at night, while you're sleepin', Zuck's lawyers are a-creepin' all arou-ou-ound

    the mighty TOS.

    (Personally, I hope the Australian courts find a way to smack Facebook's teeth down their collective throat; but if the TOS covers it - and I'll bet all public posts are covered, maybe all posted data is covered - they'll have an uphill slog on their hands)

  • What do you expect when you upload your entire life to their servers? It's their platform and it's "free" to use. You can't possibly expect any privacy out of these people. I'm sure it's also in the terms of service everyone ignores, which is on everyone that chose to ignore it.

    So of course Meta scraped everything on "their" servers. You willingly gave it to them.

    I think the quiet part got left out though. That every government likely bought all this information from Meta but isn't saying so. It's the perfe

  • that Zuck is done apologizing, as we were informed in another Slashdot article today.

  • We get more traffic today from Facebook links than Google links. Take all you want - we'll make more! This is exactly the same thing that search engines have been doing since WWW (World Wide Worm). FB has zero to apologize for. What is cool, is the data is on the open web and FB put it back on the web via Open Source LLM. That's one better than Google. Oh hey - how about that Archive.org with no way to opt out? At least FB isn't republishing it.
  • to use my photo and posts to "train" AI, but it's an entirely different thing when it creates a picture that looks like me or begins impersonating me through the way it writes, jokes, interacts.

    When it uses a picture that looks like me to, say, advertise a pack of extra-small condoms, what rights do I have then? You don't do "training" for no reason...

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