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.
People in support of former South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol rally near Seoul Central District Court in Seoul on Feb. 19, 2026. The court sentenced him to life imprisonment the same day for leading an insurrection with his short-lived declaration of martial law in December 2024.
65: The age of former South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol, who was sentenced to life in prison on Thursday after being found guilty of plotting an insurrection when he declared martial law in 2024.
In an era when geopolitics can feel overwhelming and remote, sometimes the best messengers are made of felt and foam.
The Hungarian election is off to the races, and nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is facing his most serious challenger in 16 years.
Does skepticism rule the day in politics? Public opinion data collected as part of the Munich Security Conference’s annual report found that large shares of respondents in G7 and several BRICS countries believed their governments’ policies would leave future generations worse off.