Meta acknowledges it’s training AI on all public posts

If you’re wondering if your Facebook and Instagram posts have been used to train AI models at parent company Meta, the answer is almost certainly yes.

That’s probably not a huge surprise. Meta already announced that it’s using user content and data to train AI — but this week, its global privacy director, Melinda Claybaugh, acknowledged just how much of that content was actually used.

The topic came up at an inquiry with Australian lawmakers, where Greens senator David Shoebridge said, “Meta has just decided that you will scrape all of the photos and all of the texts from every public post on Instagram or Facebook since 2007, unless there was a conscious decision to set them on private. That’s the reality, isn’t it?”

To which Claybaugh answered: “Correct.”

On today’s TechCrunch Minute, we discuss what’s been scraped, what’s been excluded, and how that differs depending on where you live.