Facebook users say they’ve caught the app analyzing their camera roll with Meta AI without their knowledge—here’s how to make sure it doesn’t happen
You might notice eerily familiar AI-generated images in your Story suggestions on the Facebook app lately—because Facebook has been automatically creating AI-generated versions of photos from users’ camera rolls.
If you try creating a new Story on Facebook right now, you could get a pop-up asking if you want to “Allow cloud processing to get creative ideas made for you from your camera roll.” TechCrunch has screenshots of what this pop-up looks like so you know what to look for.
The description for the feature states, “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.”
That effectively means that if you agree to turn this feature on, you’re giving Facebook permission to continuously crawl your entire camera roll, pulling random photos from it and uploading them to the cloud, where they might get fed through Meta’s AI image generator.
To be clear, these photos aren’t being posted on Facebook automatically. They’ll only be visible to you as suggestions for posts, but they’ll be generated automatically if you agree to the feature, and for my money, it’s another example of Meta getting way too comfortable with our personal data. It’s also worth noting that this feature is only on the Facebook app for iOS and Android, not on PC or the web version of Facebook, so if you don’t have the app installed on your phone, you’re in the clear.
However, if you do have the Facebook app installed, you should probably double-check your privacy settings. Some users have reported already seeing AI-generated versions of their photos in their suggestions, seemingly without getting a pop-up about this new feature.
If that’s the case for you, you might have already agreed to the feature by accident or you may need to tweak your Facebook privacy settings. It’s also worth noting that users in the EU may have received an email from Facebook offering an option to opt out, but if you didn’t reply, that may have counted as opting in. Regardless, you should be able to turn off this feature with just a few taps.
In the Facebook app, tap the “Settings & privacy” drop-down and select “Settings” then scroll down to “Camera roll sharing suggestions.” Here you should see two options for sharing your camera roll with Facebook, including one to “Get creative ideas made for you by allowing camera roll cloud processing.”
Turn both off and you should be good to go. For extra security, you can also go into your phone’s settings and adjust Facebook’s app permissions to block it from accessing your photos and videos (and any other data you want to keep private).
