Facebook penetrate deep: social network’s AI will process photos before they are uploaded

Meta is testing a new feature on Facebook that allows artificial intelligence to analyze users’ images before they are published on the social network. When uploading a new story, a message may appear asking to allow the service to access the device’s gallery to create collages, redesign options and generate stories based on the contents of the photo album.

By accepting the terms, the user effectively gives the system access to unpublished photos, including the ability to recognize faces, fix the date of shooting, and identify other people or objects that were in the frame. Meta also gets the right to store and use the collected data in the future. Despite the company’s statements that image processing will not be used for advertising purposes, concerns remain about the potential use of this data to train artificial intelligence models.

Meta claims that such scenarios are not considered. In a comment to The Verge, the company said that currently, photos are not used to train AI. According to them, image analysis is used solely to improve the quality of personalized recommendations and is not related to training algorithms.

Testing of the new option, as emphasized by Meta, is carried out on a limited scale. However, notifications about its availability began to appear in the application earlier this year. Users who previously provided access to their gallery are given the opportunity to disable this feature through the Facebook Help Center.