Ghanaians who use Facebook may be surprised to learn that their public posts, photos, and other data may have been used to train the company’s AI models without their knowledge or consent.
If you’re a Ghanaian Facebook user who hasn’t set your posts to private since creating your account, your data may have been used to feed Facebook’s AI products, including generative AI tools like Meta AI. This means that your:
- Public photos may have been used to improve facial recognition technology
- Posts may have been used to train AI models to understand language and sentiment
- Personal information may have been used to develop targeted advertising algorithms
This revelation comes after Facebook admitted to scraping public data from Australian adult users to improve its AI tools in a news report by ABC News Australia.
Opt-out offered to Europeans, Americans not given to Ghanaians
Facebook provides opt-out options to users in the European Union and the United States due to stringent privacy laws in these regions. However, Ghanaian users have not been given the choice to opt-out of data scraping. Even users under 18, who are exempt from data scraping, may still have their public photos used if they appear on adult accounts.
via AFR
Facebook’s global privacy director, Melinda Claybaugh, acknowledged that the company requires a vast amount of data to develop flexible and powerful AI tools.
However, this comes at the expense of users’ privacy. For Ghana especially, the lack of robust privacy laws in Ghana leaves citizens vulnerable to data exploitation. That would be the reason behind the absence of an opt-out option in Ghana; which raises significant concerns about privacy and data protection.
Whereas the Data Protection Act, 2012 (Act 843) sets out the rules and principles governing the collection, use, disclosure and care for your personal data or information by a data controller or processor – it is currently not enforced properly in the country.
To protect your online privacy, consider:
- Setting your Facebook posts to private
- Reviewing your privacy settings regularly
- Supporting calls for robust data protection laws in Ghana
