If you use Meta’s products (Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram etc) you have until 26 May to object to their use of your data for AI (training) purposes.
It’s easy to file the objection. Click on the 3 horizontal lines at the top of your screen/Settings & privacy/privacy centre/click on the word ‘object’/enter your email address.
You then receive an immediate email confirming Meta won’t use your data for training its AI models. For what it’s worth (possibly not very much!). The small print suggests there are still certain situations where they can still use your data (eg if somebody else posts your data publically).
Personally I am a very reluctant user of FB, ie only to see what our local Maire and Mairie are up to (as they only post on FB), plus Kim’s outstanding Driving License exchange site. And that’s it. No posts, no likes, no ‘friends’ etc etc…
Thank you for the warning. Social media giants are only now declaring they are gleaning while they have been active in information gathering from users for decades. They are welcome to the exchange of cartoons and girly chatter for which I use WhatsApp. I am with you on avoiding the others.
Can’t find any setting in my Whatsapp to control AI use. Maybe you have to use the AI feature for it to appear ? I’ve avoided clicking the button so far.
Fyi this is the key extract from the email you receive when you file the objection, which (in theory!) seems fairly broadly scoped in terms of covering/protecting people using Meta products.
New messages and calls are secured with end-to-end encryption. Only people in this chat can read, listen to or share them.
Learn more
This message appeared at the end of a message that I received from a friend last October, and all the many communications after it had disappeared. My friend suggests I go to ‘Settings’ and do something there but could not find anything suitable.
I think it must be something she has done unwittingly because it does not happen with anyone else. Her (and my) messages disappeared within 24 hours but sometimes within just a few minutes.
I have told her I will only use emails with her and as a result if she forgets I have to copy everything and send it by email to another email account of mine. Very tiresome.
Back to the point of the thread, why does it matter to object as described? What benefit accrues? I am very reluctant to do anything as so much depends on not well understood actions.
(Similar issue for Google AI / Google’s so-called “new” AI thing.)
You can go thrpugh the various settings in Google / Chrome to disable Gemini / AI but… also
Be careful : other browsers that have moved to the dark side, such as Opera, as they now use Google Chrome inside, have also snuck in default permission for AI (ie Google, themselves and Gemini) to harvest your data. ie at least 1 new AI setting hss been brought in on an update of Opera browser. This new parameter permitting 'use of ’ AI is arriving * already pre-ticked * to give permission. ‘Use of’ will surely include harvestng your data and tracking you too.
There has been no mention flagging this by Opera.
I noticed this after an Opera update last night and will now have to go through Opera’s other settings to check where else they’ve snuck in new AI permissions defaulted to yes as well.
My Firefox has also stopped working every time it loads a subprocess. I have a nasty feeling it’s also now using Chrome AI bits I’ve blocked in Google.
It may affect other browsers as many use Google Chrome. The only one I’m confident won’t be doing this, is Brave.
According to various articles, it would appear that the only ‘safe’ approach is not to use the WhatsApp AI tool, Llama…Meta do not let you disable or delete it, but claim they will only use your data that you have inputted into the tool, not the chat/messaging features, which as David suggested, is encrypted.
She may well have set the thread to ‘disappearing messages’ - you can choose to disappear them in 24 hours, 7 days etc.She can presumably just as easily reset the thread so that your joint messages do not disappear, which might be the simplest way to deal with it?
It’s a fair question. Minimal personal benefit accrues to me, in reality. The objective, at least for me, is to deny - in a very, very small way - Meta’s ability, as a profit driven corporation, to use my data to improve its commercial products. To me that matters as I can think of few less suitable companies to hold ANY personal data than Meta, which has a toxic reputation when it comes to abusing other people’s data. Think of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, to take just one example.
If I was (hypothetically) an author, a composer, a photographer, a musician etc (none of which I am!) I might bitterly resent Meta taking my creative outputs to help other users produce,for example a song/a book/a painting/a photograph in my style, for which they pay me nothing, and which undermines my ability to earn a living from my creative talents.
Whatever she may have done I doubt she would understand that any more than I do but, either she remembered what she had done, or did it by accident and ignorance and have made a similar but opposite mistake, the fact is that at the moment there are still messages on my screen from last Thursday. So I will wait and see but in the meantime keep copies elsewhere of what has been said.
But thank you George, if it goes belly up again I will quote what you have said to her and see if it rings a bell.
it’s a game of cat and mouse.