10mo ago

Facebook admits to scraping every Australian adult user's public photos and posts to train AI, with no opt-out option - ABC News

Facebook admits to scraping every Australian adult user's public photos and posts to train AI, with no opt-out option

6 comments

The existence of this article is confusing to me. FB doesn't need to "scrape" their own site, and they don't care about whether you set your photos to public or private.
- Why, it's so they can detect fake, AI-generated faces, of course!
Isn't the opt-out option to just not make the photos/posts globally public?
- ? They own the data. They don’t need it to be public to access it.
  
  Yes but they only performed the training on the posts and images set to be globally publicly accessible by anyone. In a sense, they took the public permissions as an indicator that they could use that data for more than just providing the bare social media service.
- I think it's also relevant that when I was growing up, people regularly changed between public and private depending on life circumstances, friend groups, etc. It was billed as a way to switch between people seeing your posts or not, NOT as a way to revoke or grant Facebook or any other entity any specific permission. It served a social function, and at a time when AI did not exist. They changed the meaning of that on us years after the fact and I have not seen any article address that. No teenager in 2011 was thinking of the private/public setting as consent for ai use, and none of these articles talk about pictures that were set to private after being public for a while. It’s bad faith

6 comments