In short:
Facebook is scraping the public data of all Australian adults on the platform, it has acknowledged in an inquiry.
The company does not offer Australians an opt out option like it does in the EU, because it has not been required to do so under privacy law.
What’s next?
Facebook representatives could not say whether an opt-out option would be offered to Australians in the future.
Say it with me now:
Everything you submit to a platform becomes property of that platform.
And your family posted, and your friends posted.
This is a key factor. It’s not possible to avoid being in their system at this point unless you live under a rock.
I was having this discussion with a coworker after Apple’s event where they talked about their image scanning AI. Like, if someone takes a picture of me, and sends it to the AI’s servers, they’ll use it as training data, but I haven’t consented to it. So how does taking it down work?
It’s obviously a rhetorical question. They obviously won’t, and they’ll tell me to pound sand.
I think it’s a really important question though, and one that bears repeating again and again. AI was built on a complete disregard for consent, and that continued disregard makes it all very unconscionable.
I had a person that hated me in high school and put up a fake profile with a picture taken of me at school. So don’t forget enemies posted!
But… I posted that copy pasta on my feed about how I didn’t give Facebook permission to scrape my data. Are you telling me that wasn’t legally binding?
“couldn’t hurt!”
This is what happens when you have a government with lack luster privacy laws.
EU citizens have less to worry over this.
It’s probably not just adults
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.
Welp
The Facebook representative could not answer whether…
This guy’s terrible at his job. Even I can answer that one.
Abso-fucking-lutely yes.
the job doesn’t involve telling the truth
My opinion is that if your data or work is within an AI training set you should be given free access to any tools using that data. That’s only fair considering these companies also think everything should be free for them to take.
I think you should be able to get all of your data in any dataset or tool deleted whenever you ask them to. Not possible? That’s their problem not yours, should’ve thought of that before collecting all information known to man
I definitely agree with this too
Yeah, it already exists in the EU
Well yeah, but I still can’t delete my data from ai models
Well that’s fun
I’m not Australian, and I don’t post on Facebook.
But my family posts on Facebook, including pictures of me. I hate that I didn’t consent to any of this, yet they’ve fed my face into their AI tools.
I mean, the data was public. Literally anyone could scrape it
I read this in Trump’s debate voice.
How much you wanna bet the didn’t just stop at the adult accounts
I appreciate the honesty.
Yes, but they are all up-side down.
That’s ok, so is the population distribution.
Jokes on them. Facebook in Australia is an absolute cesspool.
And nobody from Facebook is doing anything with the reports
So, the only application for this data is to build a bot which acts like an asshole and make photos of cars which assholes own.
So stuff people post publicly should be private?
If I post a picture on my private profile that only my friends can see, yes, that should be private.
Yeah but what if you post public stuff for the public to see? That’s what’s in question here I believe
The post says everything, which would include the private.
It does say public, but I guess it’s a confusing article. In any case, I’m all for privacy and not defending social media at all, just that if someone else chooses to not be private then they shouldn’t be unhappy if it’s actually not private is what I meant.
You’re right, I had misremembered the phrasing. I just hate that the current state of affairs is everything you put online is going into model training. I feel everything should be opt in. If a company wants to profit off of my stuff, they should have to ask, even if it’s hosted there, especially since when these social media sites first came about, the idea of training data models with user information wasn’t a thing.
I’d begrudgingly accept a cutoff where anything prior to a date where terms were explicitly set to include language for data modeling was excluded. It’s really dumb that the advent of new technologies just allows companies to profit of anyone’s creations with permission.
Facebook admits to scraping every Australian adult user’s public photos and posts
You’re right. I misremembered.
ABC News Australia - News Source Context (Click to view Full Report)
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MBFC: Left-Center - Credibility: High - Factual Reporting: High - Australia
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https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-09-11/facebook-scraping-photos-data-no-opt-out/104336170
