Meta Confirms It Scrapes All Public Facebook and Instagram Posts for AI Training
Meta's global privacy director admits the company scrapes all public posts from Facebook and Instagram since 2007 to train its AI models, unless users manually set their content to private.
Meta officially confirms that it scrapes every public post from Facebook and Instagram to train its artificial intelligence models. During a recent inquiry with Australian lawmakers, Meta's global privacy director Melinda Claybaugh admits that the company collects all photos and text from public posts dating back to 2007 unless a user actively makes their content private.
This broad data collection practice means that if a user shares a post publicly on either platform, Meta uses that information to build and improve its AI systems. While the company previously stated it uses user data for AI development, this acknowledgment provides a much clearer picture of the massive scale of the scraping operation.
The exact scope of what content is excluded from this data collection varies depending on where users live. The TechCrunch Minute breaks down the specifics of what Meta takes, what it leaves out, and how regional privacy laws impact the company's ability to harvest information from its billions of users around the world.