Meta has admitted that all text and photos publicly posted by adult Facebook and Instagram users since 2007 have been fed into its artificial intelligence models. Australia’s ABC News reports that during a local government inquiry into the rollout of artificial intelligence, Meta’s global privacy director, Melinda Claybaugh, initially denied claims that user data dating back to 2007 was being used for AI training before backing down after further questioning.

“The truth is that Meta simply decided to remove all photos and text from all public posts on Instagram or Facebook since 2007, unless you have deliberately made those posts private since 2007,” Greens Senator David Shoebridge stressed in the inquiry. “That’s the reality, isn’t it?”

“Correct,” Claybaugh replied.

Meta’s privacy center and blog posts admit that public posts and comments from Facebook and Instagram are sucked in to train generative AI:

We use public posts and comments on Facebook and Instagram to train generative AI models for these features and for the open source community.

For these purposes, we do not use posts or comments with an audience other than the public.

However, the company is vague about how the data is used, when the scraping began and how the data has been collected in the past. The New York Times In June, Meta did not respond, other than to confirm that setting posts to anything other than “public” prevents future scraping. This still does not delete data already collected – and people who posted in 2007 (and may have been minors at the time) did not know their photos and posts would be used in this way.

Claybaugh said Meta does not collect data from users under 18. When Labor Senator Tony Sheldon asked if Meta would collect the public photos of his children on his own account, Claybaugh confirmed this but could not clarify whether the company also collects adult accounts created when the user was a child.

“Meta made it clear today that if the same laws were in place in Australia, Australians’ data would also be protected,” Shoebridge told ABC News. “The government’s failure to act on data protection means companies like Meta will continue to monetize and exploit children’s images and videos on Facebook.”