Meta has fed its AI almost everything you’ve released publicly since 2007.

Meta admitted that all text and photos that adult Facebook and Instagram users have posted publicly since 2007 were fed into its AI models. Australian station ABC News reports that Meta’s global chief privacy officer, Melinda Claybaugh, initially dismissed claims that user data dating back to 2007 was being used to train AI during a local investigation into AI deployments, but relented after additional questions.

“The truth is that unless you knowingly made those posts private since 2007, Meta simply decided that it would scrape all the images and all the text from every public post on Instagram or Facebook since 2007, unless you knowingly made the decision to make them private,” Green Party senator David Shoebridge pressed the inquiry. “That’s the reality, isn’t it?”

“That’s true,” Claybaugh replied.

Finish privacy center AND blog entries we confirm the collection of public posts and comments from Facebook and Instagram to train generative AI:

We leverage public Facebook and Instagram posts and comments to train generative AI models for these features, as well as for the open source community.

We do not exploit posts or comments intended for audiences other than Public for this purpose.

However, the company has been unclear about how the data is used, when it began collecting it and how far back its collection goes. He asked Recent York Times in June Meta did not respond, except to confirm that the postings were set to anything other than “public” will prevent future scraping. This won’t delete data that’s already been collected — and the people who posted in 2007 (who may have been minors at the time) had no idea their photos and posts would be used in this way.

Claybaugh said Meta does not collect data from users under the age of 18. When Labor senator Tony Sheldon asked whether Meta would collect public photos of his children on his own account, Claybaugh confirmed that it would, and was unable to clarify whether the company would also collect data from adult accounts that were created when the user was still a child.

“Meta made it clear today that if Australia had the same laws, Australians’ data would be protected too,” Shoebridge told ABC News. “The government’s lack of action on privacy means companies like Meta continue to monetize and exploit children’s photos and videos on Facebook.”