Meta will resume scraping the personal public feeds of UK Facebook and Instagram users to train AI after reaching an agreement with the UK's Information Commissioner (ICO).
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This summer, Meta agreed to stop using historical data from UK and EU users of its platforms to train machine learning systems after privacy concerns were raised by activist group noyb. Now the social network has been approved by regulators to resume harvesting UK adults' comments and posts, after agreeing to make it easier for people to opt out and give them more time to decide whether their data is used to train a giant neural network.
"In June, Meta paused its plans to use Facebook and Instagram user data to train generative AI in response to a request from the ICO," said Stephen Almond, executive director of regulatory risk at the ICO.
"It has since made changes to its approach, including making it easier for users to object to processing and giving them a longer time to do so. Meta has now taken the decision to resume its plans, and we will monitor the situation as Meta moving to inform UK users and begin processing in the coming weeks."
