Noyb, the European Center for Digital Rights, today filed complaints in 11 European countries to prevent Meta Platforms Inc. from going ahead with its plan to train its artificial intelligence products on personal posts and images taken from the Facebook and Instagram accounts of its European user base.

Meta will use public and nonpublic posts, with the data collection going back to 2007. This will also include accounts that have gone “dormant,” meaning people who seem to have stopped posting.

Everything appears to be up for grabs, with the exception of personal conversations, although Meta has said that conversations between users and businesses are fair game. This work will begin on June 26.

AI companies have come under a lot of heat lately for using data to train their products without explicit permission, from news publishers to recording artists to chat forums. It’s likely Meta sees its own customers as a bottomless reservoir of data that can be exploited, although after the announcement it was only ever a matter of time before there was a backlash. It’s now being said that the data of the users that Meta has in Europe should be protected under the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, GDPR, at least if the users are living in the union.

“Meta is basically saying that it can use any data from any source for any purpose and make it available to anyone in the world, as long as it’s done via AI technology,” said noyb founder Max Schrems. “This is clearly the opposite of GDPR compliance. AI technology is an extremely broad term. Much like using your data in databases, it has no real legal limit.”

He went on to say it’s problematic that Meta isn’t saying how it will use the data, whether it will help train a chatbot, leading to “aggressive, personalized advertising” or will help train a “killer drone.” Meta has only explained in vague terms that the data will be used to train generative AI. “These features and experiences need to be trained on information that reflects the diverse cultures and languages of the European communities,” the company said in a blog post back in May.

In a call with investors last February, Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg sounded like a man who had struck gold when he told investors, “There are hundreds of billions of publicly shared images and tens of billions of public videos” his company could exploit. Nonetheless, at least some customers who received the email in the EU and the U.K. were taken aback. Just today there were reports that users were leaving Instagram en masse because they don’t want their data being used by Meta.

The company has given its users an opt-out or “right to object” choice, but this has been criticized as being slightly deceptive. “Meta makes it extremely complicated to object, even requiring personal reasons,” said Noyb. “A technical analysis of the opt-out links even showed that Meta requires a login to view an otherwise public page.”

Photo: Anthony Quintano/Flickr