Australian senators questioned top Meta executives about allowing users to choose whether their data is collected. They were concerned about Meta’s use of public Facebook and Instagram posts to train its AI model. Meta’s privacy policy director admitted that the company harvests photos and posts from users over 18 without their consent.

The committee overseeing AI adoption in Australia expressed concerns about millions of Australians’ public photos, videos, and posts being used to train Meta’s AI model without their consent. Meta has allowed European users to opt out of this data scraping process due to privacy concerns raised by EU regulators.

Australian senators demanded the same option for Australian users and criticised Meta for only allowing users to prevent future scraping by setting their posts to private. They argued that since 2007, Meta has been collecting all public Instagram and Facebook posts from Australians unless they were consciously set to private.

Similar privacy concerns have been raised in India, with a digital rights group urging the Indian Ministry of Information and Technology to minimise harm to Indian users and give users the autonomy to restrict Meta’s AI’s data processing through simple and clear processes.

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