In one of the latest examples of its misuse of user accounts and private data, Meta admitted to scraping all the public content of every adult Australian with no opt-out option.
The company has now come under fire after this was revealed to the public and has admitted that it gave no opt-out option for Australians in particular, while ravenously sucking up their posts, images and other posted media from its social media assets.
Users in the European Union, for example, were able to opt out of this data vacuuming, largely due to the much stricter laws in the Union about how data is used by tech companies.
Meta’s global privacy director, Melinda Claybaugh was questioned about these practices during a recent Senate inquiry.
Though she initially tried to squirm out of admitting to the data scraping on such a scale by claiming “We have not done that”, she later admitted that actually, yep, the company had done exactly that.
According to reporting by ABC News Australia, one Senator, David Shoebridge asked,
“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?
To this, Claybaugh simply stated, “Correct”.
She added that accounts belonging to those under the age of 18 weren’t scraped, but even this (given the rest of Meta’s dishonesty) dubious claim came with caveats and holes:
Another senator, asking if public photos of his own children on his account would still be included in the scraping, got the answer from Claybaugh that they would.
Then, of course, there’s the issue of what Meta based its supposed guidance for not scraping accounts belonging to those under 18. If this was based on these users’ self-asserted birthdays on its social media platforms, it leaves room for the scraping of many accounts belonging to minors.
The Meta rep also “could not” answer the question of whether the company scraped data from previous years of users who were now adults but had been under the age of 18 at some point after 2007.
In other words, like the rest of Meta’s assertions through Claybaugh about the scraping, any claims of not having used public media from the accounts of minors are doubtful at best.
Claybaugh, after admitting that no opt-out was possible for Australians, elaborated,
“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. I will say that the ongoing conversation in Europe is the direct result of the existing regulatory landscape.”
She ambiguously added that although Australian users could set their data to private, they had no option for opting out of the data scraping.
Whether this means that private data wasn’t touched or that even private data was scraped anyhow is open to interpretation based on her statements to the Senate.
Amusingly, given the sheer scope of user data now digested by Meta’s AI for many different and opaque uses, Claybaugh also claimed that the company needed as much of this data as possible for the sake of safer Meta products. It’s worth noting that for Meta’s AI, these uses could include photorealistic image generation modeled from real human faces.
Apparently, the question of even very basic data privacy or misuse of users’ intimate data doesn’t fit into the scope of what Meta considers a concern for safer products.
Images credit: Unsplash, Meta
