The moment someone goes online and starts using a service like Facebook or Instagram, it should be obvious that anything not set as a private item would be scraped and used by some third party. However, it is Meta, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp's parent company, which has just confirmed that all public data from 2007 onwards belonging to Australian adults was used to fuel artificial intelligence models. The outrageous part? Australians didn't have the chance that was offered to Europeans and US users, namely the possibility to opt out.

When talking to Meta’s global privacy director, Melinda Claybaugh, Green Party senator David Shoebridge said that "The truth of the matter is that unless you have consciously set those posts to private since 2007, 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?" Claybaugh replied using a single word, which was unfortunately "Correct" and nothing else.

Meta is still quite reluctant to talk in-depth about how the scraped data is used, but only confirmed that posts set to anything else than "public" will be safe from future scraping. However, what happens to the public posts and images since 2007? It's probably a part of the matrix by now, and there's nothing to do, apparently. David Harley might have something to do about it, or at least some good advice for the future, via his Facebook: Sins & Insensitivities book, which is available for $9.48 in Kindle format and $15 in paperback version.