Meta's AI is scraping users' photos and posts. Europeans can opt out, but Australians cannot

Meta is using the public Facebook and Instagram photos and posts of its users to train artificial intelligence and, while European users have been allowed to opt out of the mass-scraping of their content, Australian users do not have that option, a parliamentary committee has heard. The parent company of Facebook and Instagram paused the launch of its AI product in Europe in July due to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) privacy rules, and as a result of GDPR law. Meta was ordered to stop training its large language model on data from European users on privacy concerns, and Meta has given European users an opt-out option. Labor's chair of the inquiry examining AI adoption in Australia, senator Tony Sheldon, questioned Meta executives on Tuesday why that option had not been extended to Australian users. "I'll be very frank with you. I'd like to opt out in Australia … and I'd like to have the options similar to Europe, for all Australians, including for myself personally. Why can't I have that option?"