Meta Back At It, Harvesting Britons' Public Facebook, Insta Feeds For AI Training

Meta is going to resume scraping the personal public feeds of British Facebook and Instagram users for training AI after reaching an agreement with the UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO).

This summer, Meta agreed to stop using historical data from British and EU users of its platforms to train machine-learning systems after privacy concerns were raised by activist group noyb. Now the social network has been cleared by regulators to resume harvesting UK adults' comments and posts, after agreeing to make it easier for people to opt out and giving them more time to decide whether their data will be used to train a giant neural network.

"In June, Meta paused its plans to use Facebook and Instagram user data to train generative AI in response to a request from the ICO," said Stephen Almond, executive director of regulatory risk at the ICO.

"It has since made changes to its approach, including making it simpler for users to object to the processing and providing them with a longer window to do so. Meta has now taken the decision to resume its plans, and we will monitor the situation as Meta moves to inform UK users and commence processing in the coming weeks."

The ICO said it will continue to monitor the situation to make sure Brits' rights aren't infringed. Quite how this will affect Google and others in their data scraping efforts we're still looking into, although Meta claims it is "more transparent than our industry counterparts" over grabbing such content.

• Meta won't train AI on Euro posts after all, as watchdogs put their paws down
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• Meta faces multiple complaints in Europe over plans to train AI on user data

Meta has been taking flak around the world for using its mountains of social media posts to train AI engines. On Wednesday, the Mark Zuckerberg-run mega-corp admitted to the Australian parliament that users in the country were having their posts from 2007 onward added to the pool of training data, including images of minors.

As for the UK, Meta promises to only use public material from adults and provide a clear mechanism for people to object to the use of their data for AI training. The first notifications to users explaining how their data will be used should be arriving next week, the social media giant said, and it thanked the ICO for giving the green light to the move and confirming that such data harvesting was legal.

"Our generative AI models will reflect British culture, history, and idiom, and that UK companies and institutions will be able to utilize the latest technology," Meta said.

"We’re building AI at Meta to reflect the diverse communities around the world and we look forward to launching it in more countries and languages later this year." ®

PS: Former UK deputy prime minister, now senior Meta exec, Sir Nick Clegg the other day tore into Elon Musk, saying the Tesla billionaire has turned Twitter into "a sort of one man, sort of hyper-partisan and ideological hobby horse."