Facebook’s camera roll cloud processing feature puts your photos and videos in the hands of Meta.
There’s good news and bad news: The bad news is that Meta’s continued development of generative AI has led it to add a privacy nightmare setting to its Facebook app. The good news is that, in a big departure from Meta’s status quo, you have control over whether you participate.
It’s all about whether the company and its AI get access to your camera roll and all the pictures there, even the ones you haven’t posted anywhere.
Meta, Facebook’s parent company, has been trying to keep up with AI heavyweights for the past few years in an ultracompetitive race to make the most advanced AI models. Meta distinguished itself by adding its AI to its social media apps, including Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp and Messenger. Nowadays, most of us who use those apps have to interact with Meta AI, even if we don’t want to.
The company also uses the social media posts that its adult users share publicly to train its AI. There is no way to opt out of training, though European users can object to their data being used thanks to more stringent privacy laws protecting them. For those of us who are concerned about AI systems eating up the content we share online, it’s been a nonstop headache.
