Our schools post our kids' photos on public Facebook pages. Meta confirmed under oath that those photos are scraped to train artificial intelligence. None of us consented to this. Here's the evidence, and what we can do about it together.
Schools post photos on Facebook the same way they always have. But the things that happen to a photo on a public Facebook Page in 2026 are very different from what happened in 2016.
Meta confirmed to the Australian Senate that every public post since 2007 is used to train its AI models, including photos of children on adult accounts. Australian users have no opt-out.
Clearview AI scraped 30 billion+ photos from Facebook to build a facial recognition database used by law enforcement nearly a million times. Children's faces are included.
In June 2024, AI-generated nude images of 50+ schoolgirls from a Melbourne school were created using their social media photos and circulated online.
Human Rights Watch found 362 identifiable Australian children in the LAION-5B dataset, from a sample of less than 0.0001%. The real number is vastly higher.
The NSW consent form is binary: all public publishing or nothing. No parent was told their child's photos would train AI systems. The consent is fundamentally stale.
Moving to a private Group stops the worst of the harm. But it doesn't stop Meta. Getting off Facebook does. Here's the honest picture of what each level of action actually protects.
"Meta has just decided that you will scrape all of the photos and all of the text from every public post on Instagram or Facebook that Australians have shared since 2007, unless there was a conscious decision to set them on private." Senator David Shoebridge, Australian Senate Select Committee on Adopting AI, September 2024
In December 2025, Australia's Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act took effect, requiring platforms to prevent under-16s from having accounts. 4.7 million accounts were removed. As a country, we decided social media isn't safe for our children.
But our schools, through no fault of their own, are still posting identifiable photos of our children on those same platforms. This isn't anyone's failure. It's a gap that nobody noticed until the technology changed beneath our feet. Now we need to catch up.
The law protects our children from being on social media. Nothing yet protects them from being published on it.
The NSW Department of Education's "Permission to Publish" form offers parents a single binary choice: consent to all public publishing (website, newsletter, Facebook, newspapers) or none of it. There is no option to say "yes to the school newsletter, no to public social media." The form makes no mention of AI training, facial recognition, or data scraping.
Photos already scraped can't be unscraped. But together, we can stop it getting worse. The first step: stop publicly publishing our children's photos on Facebook. Then keep going.