Facebook’s New AI Tool Requests Photo Uploads for Personalized Suggestions, Raising Privacy Issues

Facebook, the social network platform owned by Meta, is asking for users to upload pictures from their phones to suggest collages, recaps, and other ideas using artificial intelligence (AI), including those that have not been directly uploaded to the service.

According to TechCrunch, which first reported the feature, users are being served a new pop-up message asking for permission to “allow cloud processing” when they are attempting to create a new Story on Facebook.

“To create ideas for you, we’ll select media from your camera roll and upload it to our cloud on an ongoing basis, based on info like time, location or themes,” the company notes in the pop-up. “Only you can see suggestions. Your media won’t be used for ads targeting. We’ll check it for safety and integrity purposes.”

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Should users consent to their photos being processed on the cloud, Meta also states that they are agreeing to its AI terms, which allow it to analyze their media and facial features.

On a help page, Meta says “this feature isn’t yet available for everyone,” and that it’s limited to users in the United States and Canada. It also pointed out to TechCrunch that these AI suggestions are opt-in and can be disabled at any time.

The development is yet another example of how companies are racing to integrate AI features into their products, oftentimes at the cost of user privacy.

Last month, Meta began to train its AI models using public data shared by adults across its platforms in the European Union after it received approval from the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC). The company suspended the use of generative AI tools in Brazil in July 2024 in response to privacy concerns raised by the government.

The social media giant has also added AI features to WhatsApp, the most recent being the ability to summarize unread messages in chats using a privacy-focused approach it calls Private Processing.

Facebook’s AI feature also comes as one of Germany’s data protection watchdogs called on Apple and Google to remove DeepSeek’s apps from their respective app stores due to unlawful user data transfers to China, following similar concerns raised by several countries at the start of the year.

“The service processes extensive personal data of the users, including all text entries, chat histories and uploaded files as well as information about the location, the devices used and networks,” according to a statement released by the Berlin Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information. “The service transmits the collected personal data of the users to Chinese processors and stores it on servers in China.”

These transfers violate the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) of the European Union, given the lack of guarantees that the data of German users in China are protected at a level equivalent to the bloc.

Earlier this week, Reuters reported that the Chinese AI company is assisting the country’s military and intelligence operations, and that it’s sharing user information with Beijing, citing an anonymous U.S. Department of State official.

A couple of weeks ago, OpenAI also landed a $200 million with the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) to “develop prototype frontier AI capabilities to address critical national security challenges in both warfighting and enterprise domains.”

The company said it will help the Pentagon “identify and prototype how frontier AI can transform its administrative operations, from improving how service members and their families get health care, to streamlining how they look at program and acquisition data, to supporting proactive cyber defense.”

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