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There's increased scrutiny of Meta Platforms in Australia, where regulators look with skepticism upon the company's usage of publicly available posts on both Facebook and Instagram to train its AI models.
At a hearing before an Australian parliamentary committee, Melinda Claybaugh, the privacy policy director at Meta, confirmed that the tech giant scrapes content from public profiles without users' explicit consent.
All the ways through which Meta collects data, especially from public posts of users aged over 18, have made people skeptical that it will result in violations of privacy. Claybaugh emphasized that while the users can set their posts to private, past public posts may have already been scraped, a sharp reality that didn’t go down well with Australian lawmakers.
Senator Tony Sheldon, who chairs the AI oversight panel, has expressed frustration with the practices of Meta, "There are millions of Australians who have not consented to using their photos, their videos, or their lives to train an AI model."
Comments are truly reflective of a growing sense that it is about time tech companies are held accountable for invasive methods of data collection.
Currently, Meta only offers opt-out controls to users in the European Union after regulators ordered it to stop training its AI models on data from users in the EU.
Other lawmakers now want the same rights for Australian users; among them is Australian Senator David Shoebridge. He has spoken skeptically of Meta's post-scraping public policy, citing that it would require users to make all older posts private retroactively to stem the flow of their data.
"The reality is, unless Australians consciously set their posts to private since 2007, Meta has been scraping their content," said Senator Shoebridge.
Criticism over Meta's data handling practices is not particular to Australian soil. In India, too, similar complaints were filed by the Software Freedom Law Centre, a Gurgaon-based firm, calling on the government to bring in more definite processes for the user to opt-out. In a letter to the Ministry of Information and Technology, the group asked for more transparency in the use of personal and non-personal data by AI systems and more independence of the user in making choices regarding their data.
Besides the growing regulatory pressure, Meta also fights against the growing challenge from lawmakers globally, who demand more robust protection against privacy violations and increased control of user data. Although the company has just started to act on concerns raised by European regulators, it will be a question as to whether it extends protection and control measures to other markets such as Australia and India.
