Facebook‘s AI to Preview Unshared Photos in new Feature, Raising Privacy Questions
MENLO PARK, Calif. – Facebook is launching a new feature that allows its artificial intelligence to suggest edits and collages using photos directly from a user’s camera roll – even images that haven’t been uploaded to the platform, the company announced Friday. The move has sparked privacy concerns as it grants Meta access to previously private visual data.
According to Meta,the AI will ”select media from your camera roll and upload it to our cloud on an ongoing basis” to generate creative suggestions. However, Meta states it will not use this camera roll media to improve its AI unless a user chooses to edit the suggestions with its AI tools or publishes the resulting creations to Facebook.
“This means the camera roll media uploaded by this feature to make suggestions won’t be used to improve AI at Meta.Only if you edit the suggestions with our AI tools or publish those suggestions to Facebook, improvements to AI at Meta might potentially be made,” clarified Meta spokesperson Mari Melguizo.
The feature, aimed at users who want to enhance photos before sharing or lack time for extensive editing, will ask users to “allow cloud processing to get creative ideas made for you from your camera roll.” It remains unclear whether the prompt will explicitly warn users about potential AI training. Meta plans to roll out the feature in the coming months.
This announcement follows last year’s revelation that Meta had already trained its AI models on publicly posted photos and text from Facebook and instagram dating back to 2007. While Meta claims the new feature’s data “won’t be used for ad targeting,” the company previously indicated it might retain uploaded data for longer than 30 days.
