Facebook Training Its AI Using a Billion Non-Europeans’ Instagram Photos
Team Zukerberg’s “SEER” might be learning via your holiday photos — unless you’re protected by the GDPR.
Facebook has announced an AI breakthrough: its slightly-terrifyingly-named “SEER” (SElf-supERvised) AI model has been trained using unlabelled photos, supposedly removing the requirement for human intervention.
But Facebook chose to exclude EU users (and presumably those from the UK and the wider EEA), due to protections afforded by the GDPR.
This is a noteworthy decision. Tech firms often claim this type of aggregate data processing doesn’t constitute an invasion of privacy.
So why exclude those people protected by the world’s most powerful privacy law?
Non-Europeans should be asking whether this is what they reasonably expected when they signed up for Instagram.
