The Zuck: Limited by Regulation. Is This a Surprise?
September 25, 2024
Privacy laws in the EU are having an effect on Meta’s actions in that region. That’s great. But what about the rest of the world? When pressed by Australian senators, a the company’s global privacy director Melinda Claybaugh fessed up. “Facebook Admits to Scraping Every Australian Adult User’s Public Photos and Posts to Train AI, with No Opt-Out Option,” reports ABC News. Journalist Jake Evans writes:
“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. The Facebook representative could not answer whether the company scraped data from previous years of users who were now adults, but were under 18 when they created their accounts.”
Why do users in Australia not receive the same opt-out courtesy those in the EU enjoy? Simple, responds Ms. Claybaugh—their government has not required it. Not yet, anyway. But Privacy Act reforms are in the works there, a response to a 2020 review that found laws to be outdated. The updated legislation is expected to be announced in August—four years after the review was completed. Ah, the glacial pace of bureaucracy. Better late than never, one supposes.
Cynthia Murrell, September 25, 2024
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