Meta scrapes every public photo from 3.07 billion Facebook and Instagram users to train AI models while stripping photographer metadata, and photographers cannot meaningfully opt out

Meta updated its privacy policy on June 26, 2024, to explicitly allow using all public Facebook and Instagram posts, photos, and captions to train its AI models. The company admitted to scraping every public photo from every adult Australian Facebook and Instagram user, and leaked documents revealed Meta scraped content from approximately 6 million unique websites including 100,000 top-ranked domains. Simultaneously, Instagram and Facebook strip all EXIF, IPTC, and XMP metadata from uploaded photos, removing copyright management information, creator attribution, and licensing terms. Why it matters: photographers who built audiences on Instagram over a decade now have their entire portfolios ingested for AI training without compensation, so they face the choice of abandoning their primary marketing channel or having their style replicated by AI, so photographers who leave lose access to their client pipeline, so those who stay subsidize Meta's AI products with free training data, so the photographer's creative output becomes a commodity input for a company generating $134 billion in annual ad revenue. The structural root cause is that Meta's terms of service grant the company a 'non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license' to use uploaded content, which was written before AI training existed but is now interpreted to cover it, and the opt-out mechanism is buried in settings, applies only prospectively, and does not cover content already ingested.