Meta is training AI on our children's photos

The Senate testimony

11 September 2024. Meta's global privacy director Melinda Claybaugh appeared before the Australian Senate Select Committee on Adopting Artificial Intelligence. Under questioning from Greens Senator David Shoebridge, she confirmed that Meta scrapes every public Facebook and Instagram post by Australian adults since 2007 to train its AI models, including Llama and Meta AI.

When Shoebridge asked Claybaugh directly whether Meta had been scraping posts going back to 2007, she responded with a single word: "Correct."

"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, 11 September 2024

Children's photos are included

Claybaugh confirmed that Meta excludes data from accounts belonging to users under 18. That sounds like a protection. It is not.

Photos of children posted on adult or organisational accounts are not excluded. A school Facebook Page is an organisational account run by adults. Every photo of every child posted on that public Page is available to Meta for AI training. The system does not distinguish between a product photo and a photo of a six-year-old at a Book Week parade.

Senator Tony Sheldon pressed this point, noting that parents who post photos of their "13-year-old daughter" or "nine-year-old son" would have no idea those images were being harvested for AI training. Claybaugh confirmed Meta does not exclude children's images from adult posts.

No Australian opt-out

Europeans can opt out of AI training under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Meta paused launching AI products in Europe entirely while regulatory uncertainty persisted. Australians get no such protection.

When asked why, Claybaugh was blunt:

"The specific option that we're offering in Europe is in response to a very specific legal framework." Melinda Claybaugh, Meta Global Privacy Director, Australian Senate, 11 September 2024

Translation: Meta provides privacy protections only where the law forces it. Australia's current privacy laws do not force it. So Australian families get nothing.

"Meta made it clear today that if Australia had these same laws, Australians' data would also have been protected." Senator David Shoebridge, 11 September 2024

Scale

Facebook has approximately 19 million monthly active Australian users. In NSW alone, an audit of every government school found 1,780 schools (82%) operate public Facebook Pages, serving 637,818 students. The pattern is consistent: 83% of metro schools, 81% of regional schools, 82% of outer regional schools. Nearly two decades of content from every one of those Pages has been fed into Meta's AI training systems.

Once a photo has been processed into AI model weights during training, it cannot be removed. There is no "delete" button for training data that has already been incorporated. Deleting the original post from Facebook changes nothing for models already trained. The patterns learned from a child's face persist inside the model permanently.

Regulatory response

Current status

As of April 2026, Australians have no opt-out for Meta's AI training on public posts. Moving a school Facebook Page to a private Group prevents scraping of future public posts by third parties, but Meta's terms of service for content posted within its own platform remain broad. The only way to fully stop Meta from using children's photos for AI training is to stop posting children's photos on Meta's platforms entirely.