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| - In September 2024, numerous social media users shared a message that claimed to protect users on Instagram and Facebook against Meta using their personal information to train its artificial-intelligence tools.
The message — a copypasta, or copy-and-paste message that users can easily share — read:
Goodbye, Meta AI. Please note that an attorney has advised us to put this on; failure to do so may result in legal consequences. As Meta is now a public entity, all members must post a similar statement. If you do not post at least once, it will be assumed you are OK with them using your information and photos. I do not give Meta or anyone else permission to use any of my personal data, profile information or photos.
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The message was one of many that have gone viral in recent years on the premise that they will supposedly improve social media users' experience or protect their personal information with a share. One user on X compared their popularity to that of email chain letters in the early days of the internet.
As with those other copypasta disclaimers alleging similar protections, the latest message was a hoax. By posting the message that begins "Goodbye Meta AI," nothing will change with users' settings or their agreement with the tech giant about how it uses their data.
Meta announced "new generative AI features" at its annual Connect conference in September 2023. With the announcement, the company released a statement on how users' info would be used to train the tools. The release read:
Publicly shared posts from Instagram and Facebook — including photos and text — were part of the data used to train the generative AI models underlying the features we announced at Connect. We didn't train these models using people's private posts. We also do not use the content of your private messages with friends and family to train our AIs.
Further, Facebook's terms of service, to which all users must agree when creating an account, state:
When you share, post or upload content that is covered by intellectual property rights on or in connection with our Products, you grant us a nonexclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free and worldwide license to host, use, distribute, modify, run, copy, publicly perform or display, translate and create derivative works of your content (consistent with your privacy and application settings).
Opting out of Meta's AI training could be impossible based on where you live. The European Union's General Data Protection Regulation — a law that "protects the fundamental rights and freedoms of natural persons and, in particular, their right to the protection of personal data" — requires the platform to give users the ability to request their information not be used. (Users can submit their case by filling out a form.) In the U.S., however, that's not the case.
According to the MIT Technology Review: "Users in the U.S. or other countries without national data privacy laws don't have any foolproof ways to prevent Meta from using their data to train AI, which has likely already been used for such purposes. Meta does not have an opt-out feature for people living in these countries."
A Meta representative told Wired: "While we don't currently have an opt-out feature, we've built in-platform tools that allow people to delete their personal information from chats with Meta AI across our apps." Also, a Meta spokesperson told MIT Technology Review users can set their accounts to private to minimize the amount of data that the tools scrape.
Snopes has reported on these type of claims for more than two decades, debunking a rumor about the so-called "internet privacy act" — a fictitious law — in 2002, as well as similar messages in 2013, 2021, 2022,
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