Last month, Meta announced that it would expand its artificial intelligence services worldwide, and the company let European users know that it would use their public information to train its AI services starting on 26 June.
Notifications sent to Facebook and Instagram users in Europe letting them know that their public posts could be used to train AI services, including Meta’s chatbot, sparked privacy concerns and backlash while as users wondered where the policy change would be. effect.
But for those living in the United States, where online privacy laws aren’t as strict, Meta AI has already used public posts to train its AI. It is not yet clear where Meta might expand the program.
Privacy watchdogs have raised concerns about the use of the data and the lack of clarity about what Meta will do with people’s information. But Meta says it complies with privacy laws and that the information it collects will make the services more relevant to users in a given region.
Here’s what you need to know about Meta’s AI chatbot and how you can opt out of sharing your information.
Meta’s chatbot is its answer to ChatGPT.
Meta AI is intelligent assistant software powered by artificial intelligence, available on apps such as Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram. It can be used in feeds, chat, and search. Similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Apple’s Siri, or Amazon’s Alexa, it’s designed to respond to almost any prompt a user gives it.
For example, you might ask: who is the greatest tennis player of all time?
“The eternal debate!” Meta AI responded to this query. “While opinions may vary, many experts and fans consider Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic to be among the greatest tennis players of all time.”
Meta AI is powered by LLaMA 3, the company’s new and powerful extended language model, an AI technology capable of conducting conversations and creating images.
The chatbot learns from Instagram and Facebook posts.
The announcement to European users triggered some negative reactions on Reddit, Tic Tac and Twitter, including in the United States, where Meta was not required to inform users – and so they may not have realized – that it had trained its AI with their public posts.
When asked, the smart assistant said it learned from “a massive set of text data” online. The information came from web pages, books, articles and research papers. But some data also came from social media posts, including posts on Facebook and Instagram, Meta AI said, adding that its training came from “anonymized and aggregated” data.
on a page on its generative AI features, Meta said photos and text from public posts on Instagram and Facebook were used to train their generative AI models, but private posts and private messages were not used. User prompts for AI features are also fair game.
A spokesperson for Meta – and its chatbot – did not specify exactly how public information was used other than to “create and improve AI experiences.” It is unclear when Meta began scraping data from US-based users.
In the United States, opt out by setting your account to private.
For Meta users in the United States, there is no way to prevent Meta AI from learning from your public social media posts, as there are no privacy laws specific to this.
“While we do not currently have an opt-out feature, we have created in-platform tools that allow users to remove their personal information from chats with Meta AI on our apps,” Meta said in a statement Friday.
According to Meta, those using Meta apps in the European Union, Britain, the European Economic Area and Switzerland have been informed that they can opt out.
Here’s how to unsubscribe (for those in Europe).
Visit the Meta Privacy Center from your Facebook account, click “data settings”, then click “off-Facebook activity”. Then select “Manage your data” and turn off “Data sharing”, as well as “AI model training”.
In EU countries, users will also see “GDPR Settings”. From there, users can click “exercise my rights” and submit an opt-out request. Users must also give the reason for unsubscribing.
On Instagram, users can tap “settings,” then “about,” and finally “privacy policy,” which will lead to information about Meta AI and how to unsubscribe.
Is it legal for Meta AI to use my data?
On Facebook legal terms, this company states that “if you share a photo on Facebook, you authorize us to store it, copy it, and share it with others.” Depending on your settings, this photo may be used for other Meta products, depending on the company.
In Europe, even with the opt-out feature introduced by Meta to comply with privacy laws, watchdog groups have expressed concerns about the widespread nature of data use.
The European Center for Digital Rights, known as NOYB (None of Your Business), has filed complaints in several European countries regarding Meta’s policy change.
“Meta doesn’t say what the data will be used for, so it could either be a simple chatbot, extremely aggressive personalized advertising or even a killer drone,” said Max Schrems, president and founder of NOYB, in a press release.
