- Mark Zuckerberg makes no secret of the fact that Meta collects public data for AI training
- But not everyone likes this practice
- If you want to prevent this or at least make data collection more difficult, we have several tips for you
Probably all of us have the social network Facebook. It is among the most popular worldwide, and even though it is not what it used to be in terms of user activity, it still has a large amount of data and is continuously emerging. Facebook uses them primarily for better targeting of advertising, however, with the rapid development of artificial intelligence, this data potentially has other uses in this area. The language models of artificial intelligence can be improved relatively easily on freely accessible data from Facebook, while we as users do not derive any direct benefit from this.
How to limit data collection by Facebook?
After all, this was also confirmed by Mark Zuckerberg himself during the presentation of the quarterly financial results for the 4th quarter of 2023. “There are hundreds of billions of publicly shared images and tens of billions of public videos on Facebook and Instagram, which we estimate is more than the Common Crawl dataset, and people also share a large amount of public text posts in comments on our services,” Zuckerberg said. This means the following: instead of using the Common Crawl dataset to train the AI, Meta uses our public data like ChatGPT. And because they’re public, they don’t have to get permission from us or pay us for them.
Meta’s artificial intelligence also learns from your publicly available data
What if you don’t want Facebook to collect your public personal data and train artificial intelligence on it? There are several possible measures.
Completing the form Rights of the subject of generative AI data
Facebook has a help center on its pages hidden form, through which you can submit requests or exercise your rights in relation to your personal data from third parties used to train Meta’s generative AI models. In this case, however, there is one catch – it is only a request, and it is not guaranteed that the Meta will comply with it. In addition, in the request you must indicate all the tasks to which you received answers from the generative AI in which your personal data appeared, which may not be easy in all cases.
Remove access by third-party apps
Another option is to remove third-party apps from accessing your profile. A lot of these could have accumulated over the years of use, and many of them can use your data to train artificial intelligence language models. In the Settings and privacy section, select settings, then select the Apps and websites menu. Here you’ll see all the websites and apps that have access to your data.
Editing preferences for advertising
Facebook is alive with advertising, and there’s not much you can do about it unless you want to pay monthly fees to use the popular social network. However, you still have at least a little control over the use of your data. In the Settings and Privacy section, select Settings, then select the Account Center menu. This is where Ads Preferences is located. Here you can adjust your preferences regarding the display of advertisements and their personalization, or you can also activate a subscription if you want to get rid of commercial messages completely.
Opting Out of Tracking Activity Outside of Meta Technologies
As is well known, Meta collects data about you even if you do not directly use Facebook or Instagram. Through various plugins, it collects information about you, for example, on websites such as eBay or Booking.com, but in practice there are many more. If you want to turn off the possibility of data collection outside the Mety services, go to the Settings and privacy section, choose settings, then select the Account Center menu. Here you can find the item Your data and permissions, within which you can have your activity displayed outside of Meta’s technologies. Here, you just have to choose Manage future activity and then Disconnect future activity, when sites outside Meta will not send any information to the social giant, while at the same time they will also delete your past activity.
Don’t overlook
Meta adapts to European legislation, the connection between Facebook and Instagram can be canceled
These steps probably won’t completely protect you from Meta collecting your personal data for AI training, but at least they’ll make it significantly more difficult for Meta to do so.
Author of the article
Michael Chrobok
Deputy editor, photographer, gamer. I enjoy baseball, F1, urban planning, Wes Anderson movies, modern art and various fantasy/sci-fi worlds. I will not despise good food, an interesting book or a trip into the unknown.
2024-02-11 19:15:00
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