Facebook users beware, Meta AI can scan all your phone photos anytime if you are not careful
Meta has consistently found itself at the centre of privacy debates. There's little doubt that the company has been using our data, for instance, our publicly posted photos across Facebook and Instagram, to train its AI models (more commonly known as Meta AI). But now, it seems Meta is taking things to another level. Recent findings suggest that it now wants full access to your phone's camera roll, meaning even photos you haven't shared on Facebook (or Instagram), yet.As reported by TechCrunch, some Facebook users have recently come across a curious pop-up while attempting to upload a Story. The notification invites them to opt into a feature called 'cloud processing.' On the surface, it sounds fair and safe, as Facebook says this setting will allow it to automatically scan your phone's camera roll and upload images to Meta's cloud 'on a regular basis.' In return, the company promises to offer 'creative ideas' such as photo collages, event recaps, AI-generated filters, and themed suggestions for birthdays, graduations, or other milestones.Sounds cool? But wait for it. When you agree to its terms of use, you're also giving Meta a go-ahead to analyse the content of your unpublished and presumably private photos on an ongoing basis as Meta AI looks at details such as facial features, objects in the frame, and even metadata like the date and location they were taken, to gradually become better.There is little doubt that the idea is to make AI more helpful for you – the user – since AI needs all the data one can possibly fathom to make sense of the real world and respond accordingly to questions and prompts you are putting out. And Meta, on its part, says that this is an opt-in feature, which is to say that users can choose to disable it as and when they want. That's fair, but given that this is user data we're talking about and given Facebook's history, some users (and privacy advocates) would be concerned.The tech giant had earlier admitted it had scraped all public content uploaded by adults on Facebook and Instagram since 2007 to help train its generative AI models. However, Meta hasn't clearly defined what 'public' means or what age qualifies someone as an 'adult' in its dataset from 2007. That haziness leaves a lot of room for different interpretations—and even more room for concern. Moreover, its updated AI terms, active since June 23, 2024, don't mention whether these cloud-processed, unpublished photos are exempt from being used as training fodder.The Verge reached out to the Meta AI executives, but they bluntly denied that Meta, "is not currently training its AI models on those photos, but it would not answer our questions about whether it might do so in future, or what rights it will hold over your camera roll images."There is, thankfully, a way out. Facebook users can dive into their settings and disable this cloud processing feature. Once turned off, Meta promises it will begin deleting any unpublished images from the cloud within 30 days. Still, the very nature of this tool—pitched as a fun and helpful feature—raises questions about how users are nudged into handing over private data without fully realising the implications.At a time when AI is reshaping how we interact with tech, companies like Meta are testing the limits of what data they can collect, analyse, and potentially monetise eventually. This latest move blurs the lines between user assistance and data extraction. What used to be a conscious decision—posting a photo to share with the world—now risks being replaced with quiet uploads in the background and invisible AI eyes watching it all unfold. We'll see how things pan out.- Ends
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