Meta Uses Your Instagram and Facebook Photos to Train Its AI

While Meta honors most objections and sends a confirmation email, many users have had their objections rejected. There’s no clear information on what factors Meta considers when making these decisions, but according to GDPR, they shouldn’t be rejecting any objections at all. In fact, because of denying users’ objections and violating GDPR law, NYOB has filed complaints in 11 European countries and has asked the authorities to initiate an investigation to stop this change immediately.

Even if you opt out of this program, there’s a slight chance Meta might still access posts related to you. For example, if your family or friends who haven’t opted out have shared a post that mentions you, then Meta can use that information. To eliminate this possibility, you would need to ask your relatives who have shared posts containing your information to also opt out of this program.

What’s the Best Thing You Can Do If You Don’t Live in the UK or EUUnfortunately, unlike the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), there’s no strict privacy law in the US or other regions that compels Meta to offer an opt-out option for this program. These regions may create such a policy in the future, but for now, there’s one thing you can do yourself.

You can prevent Meta from using your personal information from other third-party platforms to train its AI. To do this, open the Instagram app, tap your profile icon, and then navigate to the hamburger icon > Settings and Privacy > Help > Help Center.

Under “Featured Topics,” choose “About AIs on Instagram.”

Select the link “How Meta uses information for generative AI models.”

Under “Privacy and Generative AI,” click “Learn more and submit requests here.”

Choose “I want to delete any personal information from third parties used for building and improving AI at Meta.” Then, once again, to make the process long-winded for you, Meta will ask you to answer a bunch of unnecessary questions. But that’s your only option, so fill out the details and then hit “Send.”

After you submit your objection, Meta will take some time to look into your case, and they’ll let you know by email whether your objection was approved.

That’s the best thing you can do on your end to prevent Meta from using your personal information to train its AI models. With more and more AI companies launching every day, you should be very careful when signing up for any online service. They might sell your data to larger companies to train their AI models.