Stop Meta spying on you
Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp have introduced new ways to collect your personal data. Robert Irvine explains how to protect your privacy from Meta’s snooping
Facebook has always been notorious for collecting its users’ data for advertising purposes. Although its parent company, Meta, boasts of investing over $8 billion in ‘privacy progress’ since 2019 (www. snipca.com/56750), Facebook and its fellow Meta apps Instagram and WhatsApp continue to make changes that compromise your privacy rather than respect it.
Here, we explain how to stop Meta spying on you through its social and messaging tools, and using your personal data for its own gain.
Stop Meta using your Facebook data to train its AI
Since June, Meta has used content you publicly share on Facebook and Instagram, including your status updates, photos, videos and comments, to train its AI models. This doesn’t include private messages to friends and family, but you may still feel uncomfortable about your personal data being analysed by Meta AI.
You can object to Meta using your public data to train its AI models
Although Meta doesn’t provided a dedicated option to switch off AI training, under GDPR regulations you have the right to object to your data being used for this purpose. You can’t do much about content that’s already been used to train AI, but you can ask Meta to stop doing it via an online form.