Facebook Wants Access to Your Camera Roll for AI Photo Edits
In a move that has raised significant concerns among users, Meta-owned Facebook is prompting its users to enable "cloud processing" to access photos from their phones, even those not uploaded. This feature allows the social networking app to continuously upload media to its servers and use details like time, location, and theme to generate creative suggestions for AI-generated collages, recaps, and photo themes.
When creating a new Story on the Facebook app, users are presented with a screen that asks if they will opt into "cloud processing" to allow creative suggestions. If users click "Allow," they will let Facebook generate new ideas from their camera roll, including collages, recaps, AI restylings, or photo themes.
According to Facebook's explanation, only users will see AI-generated photo suggestions, and their media won't be used for ads. However, by clicking "Allow," users accept Meta's AI Terms, letting it analyze the uploaded photos, including faces, dates, and objects, for creative ideas.
The new feature poses significant privacy concerns for users because the company could use their media to train its AI models, often without clear consent. This raises questions about how Facebook plans to use this data and whether it will be stored securely.
Privacy Concerns and Data Use
Researchers from TechCrunch noticed that the feature is also available in the Preferences section under Facebook's Settings, where users can toggle on or off two toggles: one for photo suggestions and another for "cloud processing." Meta claims that this is an opt-in feature, but some experts have raised concerns about how the company plans to use user data.
"We're exploring ways to make content sharing easier for people on Facebook by testing suggestions of ready-to-share and curated content from a person's camera roll," said Maria Cubeta, a company spokesperson. "These suggestions are opt-in only and only shown to you – unless you decide to share them – and can be turned off at any time."
"Camera roll media may be used to improve these suggestions, but are not used to improve AI models in this test," she continued.
Background on Meta's Data Use Plans
In mid-May, Meta planned to use EU user data for AI training starting May 27 without explicit consent. This move sparked concerns among European regulators and user groups, who threatened a class action lawsuit if the social network giant did not desist.
Earlier this year, in April, Meta announced that it would start training its AI models using public data from adults in the EU, after pausing the plan last year over data protection concerns raised by Irish regulators. In June 2024, the social media giant announced that it was delaying the training of its large language models (LLMs) using public content shared by adults on Facebook and Instagram following the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) request.
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