SELFIES A TARGET OF DIGITAL THIEVES

EVEN your selfies and brunch photos aren’t safe from the long arm of Facebook.

The tech giant yesterday admitted more than 3.5 billion photographs were harvested from Instagram without users’ knowledge.

Chief technology officer Mike Schroepfer told the company’s annual developers conference that the photos had been used to enhance the company’s artificial intelligence technology.

Mr Schroepfer said Facebook had become overwhelmed with so much dangerous material “like offensive content, spam, hate speech, fake accounts, fake news, clickbait and more”, it had become too much for human moderators to regulate.

Instead, the company was creating an artificially intelligent moderation system to detect inappropriate images on its website.

To speed up its development – by “100 times”, he said – Facebook harvested any images shared on Instagram with hashtags, and fed the photographs into its own system over 22 days.

The images taken from Instagram, which Facebook bought for $US1 billion in 2012, included images such as family portraits.

Neither Instagram nor Facebook users were warned of the practice before the company mined their photos.