Only Facebook, now of course known as Meta, would make it mightily easy to mistakenly publicly share private queries in its Meta AI app. This is the upshot of the exposé that very private queries were being shared by mistake by many users.
Meta’s solution? To warn you to “avoid sharing personal or sensitive information” right before users hit the “post to feed” button. Most rational companies would turn off the publicising of personal information from the word go, but not Facebook, which has put both capitalism and surveillance in surveillance capitalism.
Chucking privacy out the window
This lapse in privacy in the Meta AI app was reported by Business Insider, which found “the feed was full of personal information that appeared to have been accidentally shared — things like a post that showed a parent asking the AI for advice about a wayward daughter, the audio of a pocket dial where someone chatted to coworkers about their working hours, and the text of an employee seeking legal advice about their employer.”
We probably don’t need to tell you that’s… not good. At all.
Engadget picked up the story this week and found some startling overshares, including folks asking “for advice on ‘improving bowel movements’ and inquiring whether a relative could be liable for their employer’s unpaid taxes. Another user desperately added ‘keep this private’ to his public posts in an apparent attempt to hide his embarrassing chats after the fact,” it wrote.
Read More: WhatsApp’s Meta AI to get a chat memory feature that remembers what you tell it to
Security expert Rachel Tobac pointed out the obvious problem of including a very private search function in a social media app that is ostensibly about sharing information.
“If a user’s expectations about how a tool functions don’t match reality, you’ve got yourself a huge user experience and security problem,” she wrote on Threads. “Humans have built a schema around AI chatbots and do not expect their AI chatbot prompts to show up in a social media style Discover feed — it’s not how other tools function.”
The short answer is don’t trust Facebook or Meta with anything private. If you want to turn it off, go to your Meta AI profile > Data & Privacy > Manage your information >> Make all public prompts visible only to you > Apply to all.
