Meta faces regulatory heat in Australia for scraping user data to train AI models

Meta has drawn ire from regulators in Australia over its usage of public posts on Facebook and Instagram to train its AI model. Appearing before an Australian parliamentary committee, Melinda Claybaugh, Meta’s privacy policy director, admitted that the tech giant scrapes photos and posts made public by users aged over 18 without obtaining their consent.

Claybaugh said that users’ posts that have been set to private can prevent future scraping, but that may not make much of a difference if the content has already been scraped.