Soccer goal will use content posted by users on social networks Facebook and Instagram train your artificial intelligence (AI) models. Given the company’s history and trajectory, this should come as no surprise, especially given its history of fines for non-compliance with data protection and privacy legislation and scandals such as Cambridge Analytica.

Again, we find something that is no longer surprising at this point: Meta applies questionable privacy policies when they are not outright illegal. European Union privacy legislation requires a company to at least put in place a mechanism to ensure that data published on its networks isn’t used for things like training artificial intelligence models, but as we’ve already seen with Apple and its DMA app, it appears that the option to opt out of data collection is implemented in a rather crooked way on Facebook and Instagram and is not automatic.

Meta’s future use of social media posts to train AI models is known due to the company itself notifying users located in the European Union.. Of course, far from being an honest exercise in transparency, it appears to be something enforced by European Union legislation, which tends to be quite harsh on matters such as privacy and consumer protection. This report mentions the possibility of abandoning the contribution of AI training models.

At this point, it is worth recalling that the General Data Protection Regulation of the European Union (GDPR) provides four key protections against the misuse of personal data, which are that there must be a specific and lawful reason for the processing of the data, that the personal data must be encrypted, that users have the right to copy their data and that the user can request the erasure of their data at any time.

Using user posts on social media to train their AI models is another puddle that Meta gets into, but this case is apparently less scandalous than others we know. Actually, Much worse, the company has admitted to using pirated material to train its large language modelsespecially when they see that, for example, many small YouTube creators see their work demonetized or shadow disabled for any small slip in this matter, while Meta goes unpunished for copyright infringement.

Whether the social network giant really complies with the European Union legislation must be determined by the courts and the very institutions of the community, which have repeatedly shown that they have no qualms about enforcing its authority. . The company announced that data collection will begin from June 26, 2024.