Meta Probed on Using Individual Data to Train AI

Meta said it did not use public photos posted by people under 18 but did not directly answer whether photos of kids shared by adult accounts were scraped.

A smartphone and a computer screen displaying the logos of the Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, and their parent company Meta in Toulouse, southwestern France, on Jan. 12, 2023. Lionel Bovaventure/AFP via Getty Images

An Australian Senate committee has questioned tech giant Meta about the ethics of its decision to use photos of individuals to train artificial intelligence (AI) without user knowledge.

Labor Senator Tony Sheldon, chairman of the Select Committee on Adopting AI, asked Meta’s representatives about whether the company used Australian Instagram and Facebook posts as far back as 2007 to train its AI model, as reported by the media in June 2024.