Remember that embarrassing picture of you on Facebook? The one with the red solo cups in the background that you tried to hide from future employers? No, no not that one. The other one.
Meta’s global privacy director, Melinda Claybaugh, recently told Australian legislators that, yes, the company’s artificial intelligence systems are trained in part on users’ public posts on Facebook and Instagram. The Facebook data trove dates all the way back to 2007, a year after it opened its service to the public.
The company allows users to set their posts to public or private and maintains that only the public posts are used for training AI. In Europe, users can opt out of having their information used to train Meta’s language models due to the EU’s privacy laws, and in Brazil, Meta was recently ordered to stop using its citizens’ data for this purpose.
In the UK, Meta paused training its AI on users’ posts following an inquiry from Britain’s Information Commissioner’s Office but plans to resume doing so after answering the regulator’s questions.
Given these revelations, you can guess that if you ask Meta’s AI for “embarrassing pictures from college,” its responses might be a little too accurate.
Artificial intelligence is transforming one of humanity's oldest challenges: predicting the weather. Speaking at the 2026 AI for Good Global Summit, World Meteorological Organization Secretary-General Celeste Saulo explains how AI has dramatically accelerated weather forecasting. Tasks that once required a week of computing can now generate multi-day forecasts in just minutes, making advanced forecasting faster, more accessible, and increasingly available beyond the world's largest supercomputers.
With the 2026 World Cup quarterfinals complete, we wondered what the tournament would look like if teams were competing on a different kind of playing field: clean energy.
Has Iran’s regime emerged from the war more emboldened than before? Yeganeh Torbati explains how survival itself became a victory for Tehran, giving it new leverage at home and abroad.
On GZERO World with Ian Bremmer, Yeganeh Torbati takes us inside the lives of ordinary Iranians after the war, where fear, repression, and economic hardship are shaping an uncertain future.