Facebook users now have the option to delete certain personal information that the company may utilize for training generative artificial intelligence models.
Meta, the parent company of Facebook, recently updated its website’s Facebook help center resource section. It introduced a form called “Generative AI Data Subject Rights,” allowing users to “submit requests related to your third-party information being used for generative AI model training.”
This addition comes as generative AI technology is gaining momentum in the tech industry, with companies developing advanced chatbots and transforming basic text into intricate responses and images. Meta allows users to access, modify, or erase any personal data that might have been sourced from various third-party data sources and used in training its extensive language and AI models.
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On the form, Meta defines third-party information as data “that is publicly available on the internet or licensed sources.” According to the company, this type of information can constitute some of the “billions of pieces of data” utilized in training generative AI models, which rely on predictions and patterns to generate new content. CNBC reported the news first, and now more people want to know about it.
In a related blog post explaining its use of data for generative AI, Meta mentions that it gathers public information from the internet and also obtains data through licensing agreements with other providers. For instance, according to Meta, blog posts may contain personal details like a person’s name and contact information.
It’s worth noting that the form doesn’t address a user’s activity on Meta-owned platforms, whether it’s Facebook comments or Instagram photos. This implies that the company could potentially utilize first-party data from such sources for training its generative AI models.
“At Meta, we have a responsibility to protect people’s privacy and have teams dedicated to this work for everything we build. We have a robust internal Privacy Review process that helps ensure we are using data at Meta responsibly for our products, including generative AI. We work to identify potential privacy risks that involve the collection, use, or sharing of personal information and develop ways to reduce those risks to people’s privacy,” the company says.
A spokesperson from Meta clarified that their latest Llama 2 open-source large language model “wasn’t trained on Meta user data,” and they have not yet introduced any Generative AI consumer features on their systems.
In recent times, there has been growing scrutiny from data privacy advocates regarding the practice of aggregating extensive amounts of publicly available information for training AI models.
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Just last week, a consortium of data protection agencies from countries like the U.K., Canada, Switzerland, and others jointly issued a statement to companies including Meta, Alphabet, TikTok’s parent company ByteDance, X (formerly Twitter), Microsoft, and more. The purpose of this letter was to remind social media and tech firms that they are still bound by various data protection and privacy laws worldwide. It emphasized the importance of safeguarding personal information accessible on their platforms from data scraping to ensure global compliance with data protection and privacy regulations.
How to opt-out
- Go to this “Generative AI Data Subject Rights” form.
- Select “I want to delete any personal information from third parties used for generative AI.”
- Fill in the boxes.
- Hit Send.
Featured image credit: Dima Solomin/Unsplash
