Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, is set to resume using public data from its adult users in the UK to train its artificial intelligence (AI) models.
This comes after a pause due to concerns raised by regulators, particularly around data privacy. The company will utilize publicly available content, such as posts, comments, photos, and captions shared by users on its platforms.
Meta clarified that only information from users aged 18 and above will be used in this AI training process. The data will help the tech giant improve its AI systems, which are designed to reflect the diversity of online communities globally. The company is planning to expand this initiative to more countries and languages in the coming months.
UK-based users will soon see notifications in their apps informing them about how their data is being used. Users will have the option to object to the use of their public content for AI training, and Meta has promised to respect all previous and future objections.
Meta’s AI efforts were put on hold earlier this year in the European Union after the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) raised concerns about privacy violations. The company faced regulatory pressure to ensure compliance with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which resulted in halting the rollout of its AI assistant in the region.
The resumption of AI training in the UK comes at a time when global regulators are increasingly scrutinizing how tech companies use personal data.
Recently, the DPC opened an investigation into Google’s use of EU citizens’ data to develop its AI language model, PaLM2, and also examined social media platform X’s practices. X agreed to stop using EU citizens’ personal data to train its AI chatbot, Grok, in response to the inquiry.
